


It's a Cold and It's a Broken Hallelujah

by prairiecrow



Series: One Degree of Separation [10]
Category: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Genre: Bittersweet, Children's Literature, Coma, Devotion, Doppelganger, Dreams, Eavesdropping, F/M, Friendship, Goodbyes, Grief, Jealousy, Love, Love Lost - Freeform, Love Regained, M/M, Medical Mystery, Medical Trauma, Music, Poetry, Prejudice, Reconciliation, Reunion, Robotics, Robots, Symbolism, Tears, The Uncanny Valley, The Velveteen Rabbit, Unrequited Love, Watership Down - Freeform, broken relationship, kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:29:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 32,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pamela Cunningham swore that she was done with Allen Hobby after coming out on the losing end of a love triangle that never should have existed -- but now Allen needs her in the face of the very real possibility that he's lost Joe forever, and she finds herself willing to face the existence of the love she's tried so hard to deny rather than leaving him alone in his struggle to save the mecha's mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was a crisp fall morning — bright and clear, the rocky slopes ablaze with turning leaves, and far too beautiful to suit Pamela Cunningham's aching and still-bewildered heart — when the phone call came, disturbing the quiet of her mountain home's kitchen with a soft but piercing warble. She briefly considered not answering it at all, especially when she saw the name and source that came up on call display, but when it had rung ten times she at last conceded the point and rose from the breakfast nook, abandoning her cup of black coffee to cross the gleaming white-tiled floor and answer it. 

"Hello?" It took every ounce of self-control she had to be pleasant rather than ripping the head off of —

"Hello, Pam?" It was indeed Asheed Amroliwallah, Public Relations Division Head at Cybertronics Manhattan. "Thank goodness you're home! I hope I'm not calling at a bad time?"

 _The man I love just left me for a preening, strutting conglomeration of wires and gears,_ she nearly snapped, _how do you_ think _I'm feeling?_ Instead she spoke quietly and evenly: after all, she still wanted to be able to tap this particular source for insider information in the future. "Not at all, Asheed. I was just having a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper. What can I do for you?"

Asheed was one of the most glib and garrulous men Pamela had ever had the pleasure of meeting, never at a loss for a quip or a smooth turn of phrase — but now, anomalously, he hesitated. "Actually, it's not what you can do for me — it's…" A surprising little cough. "We've got a problem here, and frankly I'm not sure who else to turn to."

Pamela shifted her gaze from the middle distance to the stunning mountainous vista outside the wrap-around windows of her kitchen, her frown deepening to one of annoyance. "Is this about that article I wrote for the _National Sentinel_ three months ago? Because I thought I was perfectly clear about the potential ramifications of —"

"The article?" For an instant he sounded perplexed; then he laughed, a strange little bark of sound. "God, no! I only wish it was! Pam… it's about Allen Hobby."

Her heart sank and soared in the same impulsive leap of feeling, creating a highly unpleasant disorienting moment of emotional whiplash. She kept her tone neutral. "Allen? I haven't seen him or spoken to him in eight days."

"I know you haven't." He still sounded uncomfortable, but the easy flow of words was back in action. "And I know why, I think — or at least, I know what people are saying about it. But that's neither here nor there. Pam, something's gone wrong. Badly wrong. And I don't just mean between you and Allen."

The surge of grief those words provoked managed to catch her by surprise. She closed her eyes and rubbed at a sudden throbbing ache in the middle of her forehead, dimly amazed that she wasn't used to it yet, this pain of separation that was over a week old. "Asheed, get to the point. Please?"

Another hesitation on the line. "I think you need to come to Cybertonics Manhattan."

That made her drop her hand and stare again, as if the small dark neatly-groomed younger man was standing right in front of her. "What?" 

"He needs you," Asheed insisted in a rush. "I know — things are over between you, aren't they?"

"Yes." She felt the old fury, mixed with a healthy dose of helpless perplexity, stiffen her spine. "He made that perfectly clear to me."

"Well, he needs you as a friend right now. Pam… he's a real mess. He's not eating, he's not sleeping, he's barely talking to anybody except his grad students, holed up in his workshop, working night and day without —"

The picture that was forming in her mind of the man she had always known as perfectly poised and supremely dignified was so distressing that it prompted her to interrupt yet again: "What's going on? Is he — is he ill?"

"It's Joe." Now he sounded weary. "Something's happened to Joe, and Allen's coming unglued. He looks right through me when I try to talk to him about it, but I thought maybe you could reach him… if you'll come here, because I have about as much chance of convincing him to leave that mecha's side right now as I do of flying to the moon under my own power."

She realized that her hand was wrapped white-knuckled around the receiver, but the awareness of her own loss of control was dim and distant. "What _happened?_ "

"I don't know," Asheed said almost despairingly, "because I can't understand half of the explanation he — or rather, one of his students — gave me. Something about interrupt prompts not being serviced… does that mean anything to you?"

 _A cube malfunction._ "Actually, it does. When did this happen?"

"Just before he came back from visiting you. It seems that Joe ran away into the woods while they were en route to Boulder, and got bogged down in a quicksand pit or something. And shot, but I don't think that's part of the current problem."

Pamela's heart clenched reflexively, once again in response to two completely different emotions: a mean-spirited gladness that the wretched machine had finally done something that clearly revealed how twisted its behavioural matrix was, and sympathy for what Allen, with his deep and unhealthy attachment to it, must be going through. She didn't want to feel sorry for him, not after the choice he'd made and what he'd done to her, and yet…

"We've got a copter on standby to bring you in from Boulder," Asheed was saying, "and we can have it there in four hours, or whenever you'd be ready to fly out." It was a powerful statement that someone much higher up the chain of command than he had taken an interest in this matter, but Pamela decided that nothing would be gained by pointing out the obvious. "Like I said, I don't know who else he'd listen to right now, if not you."

She drew a slow deep breath and forced her hand to relax, at least enough that her knuckles were no longer white. "And what, exactly, do you expect me to do once I get there?"

"Talk to him, Pam." Now he was wheedling, and she didn't miss the motivational trick he was employing by repeating her name so frequently. "It's like he's on another planet right now, and we need you to bring him back down to earth."

An expectant pause. Pamela closed her eyes again as her mind replayed, in fast-forward, her final encounter with Allen Hobby: the recriminations, the angrily rendered points and counterpoints, the shouting, culminating in her attempt to destroy the brain of the machine he adored so helplessly that he hadn't been able to bear separation from it for more than a few hours. She had failed, but it seemed that some other aspect of Fate had caught up with Joe instead.

Remembering the devastated expression on Allen's face as he'd fallen to his knees on the hearth, groping after Joe's cube, she knew that she was perfectly right to be enraged at his perversity — but that she also still loved him enough that she couldn't leave him to suffer whatever torment he was going through alone.

"I can be in Boulder in five hours," she said, giving herself enough time to pack both her own things and the personal effects that Allen had left behind when he'd hustled Joe away. 

"Excellent!" Asheed's tone shifted instantly from grim and gloomy to positively cheerful. "That's brilliant! Thank you, Pam — you have no idea how much this means to me. To us. You know we're one big family here at Cybertronics, and —"

At last a burst of annoyance cracked her carefully maintained facade. "Just tell me what to look for when I get to the airport," she said sharply, and reached for pen and paper as Asheed began relating a set of detailed instructions. She jotted them down in shorthand, but only half her mind was thus engaged: the rest of her, in fact the better part of her, was imagining what it must have taken to reduce Allen Hobby to the state that Asheed had described, and was already starting to prepare herself for what she might find when she arrived at the lost city whose shattered towers rose above a cold and distant sea.


	2. Chapter 2

The halls of the Coppelia Research Centre were as quiet and as elegant as Pamela remembered: in her first article written from the inside of Cybertronics Manhattan nineteen months ago, she'd described them as "tastefully delineated in muted browns and greens, and permeated by the sub-audible hum of exceptional intelligence harnessed to the economic engines of the Firm." It had been enough to win her repeated invitations to investigate the scientific mysteries wrought within the Centre's various enclaves and think tanks, but it hadn't been until she'd met Allen Hobby that the space had taken on an extra dimension, because it was also the home of the man she loved. 

She had, alas, only visited it once as his lover: their courtship had been a whirlwind, with their romantic connection initiated in a single night at a company function in Minneapolis, pursued via vidmessaging and emails and three further in-person encounters, and culminating in his visit to her isolated refuge in the mountains that overlooked Boulder, Colorado after Allen had attended a robotics conference in the city as its keynote speaker. He'd settled into her home as if he'd always been there — his expensively tailored housecoat across the chair at the foot of her bed, his crisp shirts in her closet, the scent of him lingering on her pillow, those thrilling traces of maleness that had been absent from her life for so long — and at moments she'd been almost deliriously happy: _So perfect, so quick, and so powerful, this connection between us! I couldn't have found a better mate if I'd searched for a thousand years…_

And it had been true. For a little while, at least.

Pamela was not a woman given to unrestrained passions, no matter how compelling the provocation. She'd kept her wits about her even in Allen's embrace — and she'd discovered within minutes of initially meeting him that she wasn't alone in his affections. 

The signs had been there earlier, of course. Throughout the Minneapolis conference she'd caught occasional glimpses of him, moving in an aura of restrained but palpable power, like a lion in winter — and there had always been a tall dark presence at his side, like his material shadow: a mecha, specifically a male iteration of the LX9 sexual simulator series. It had struck her as curious that a man of Professor Hobby's stature would employ a lover-robot as a personal assistant, and her discreet inquiries to some of her Cybertronics contacts had revealed that the robot in question, commonly known simply as Joe, had rendered Hobby an inadvertent service approximately two years ago in connection with the David 2 project: that service had included the stealing of a police amphibicopter, a crime that should have earned it instant destruction, but Hobby had intervened and secured Joe for his own use instead. It was a strange story, rendered even more intriguing by her intuition that her contacts were deliberately leaving out pieces of the puzzle, and she'd found herself studying him even more closely — at least, as best she could from afar — and noting the way he related to the simulator, smiling at it more so than would be reasonably expected, occasionally curving his fingers around its elbow when giving it an order, or laying a clearly possessive hand on the small of its back when he guided it through the crowds of the conference.

She'd scarcely paid attention to the smiles Joe had offered in return, writing them off as preprogrammed responses no more significant than the alerts issued by a coffeemaker when its libation was ready to drink. She'd been too busy looking at its owner, a man whose every detail of body language conveyed genial but effortless dominance, and who was, she decided, someone she definitely wanted to become better acquainted with.

Everyone in the industry knew Allen Hobby by reputation, of course: he was a true Renaissance man of the robotics field, a scientist with four post-doctoral degrees to his name and a crown of design laurels that would have done ten ordinary roboticists proud. Only a man of his genius would have been capable of envisioning and completing the David 2 project, and he hadn't been a mere administrator: he'd been on the front lines of the creation process every step of the way, and in spite of the project's conspicuous failure in its initial trial and the public backlash that had eventually shut it down completely… well, it was a tribute to Hobby's status in the field that his reputation had survived such a crushing blow virtually intact. He hadn't initiated any major research since, seeming content to act as a consultant on several other prestigious undertakings at Cybertronics, and to teach and counsel the graduate students sent to him by prominent universities all over North America. 

That much was public knowledge. A few more questions on Pamela's part, most of them posed over drinks in hotel bars, revealed rumours among Cybertronics employees that he was in fact involved in a personal project that was strictly hush-hush, but that might involve an adaptation of the David 2 imprinting protocols. This had struck Pamela as an idea both highly promising (if existing mecha could be imprinted with unshakeable loyalty to an individual or a corporation) and rather dangerous (the files on David 2's behaviour following imprinting had leaked around the time Pamela had started freelancing for Cybertronics, and they'd made for disturbing reading), and she'd made a mental note to do some subtle probing on the subject if she was able to win a conversation with the Professor, whose company was in high demand.

As it turned out, getting Hobby's attention at the Cybertronics-hosted formal dress affair on the final night of the conference hadn't been half the struggle she'd anticipated. Nor should it have been, given how carefully she'd adorned herself in an indigo sheath dress of watered silk that had flattered her still-lush curves, and the attention she'd paid to her makeup and her hair. She was approaching fifty years of age but she knew that she was still a vital and attractive woman — and that her greatest asset was her intelligence, at least as far as a man like Hobby was concerned. So she'd slipped into the circle of conversation around him as he held court and embarked upon a dance of intellectual seduction, relieved to see that for once the mecha wasn't with him.

It hadn't taken long for Joe to show up, ten minutes perhaps. But by the time it did, Hobby — "Please, call me Allen." — had focussed on Pamela both mentally and physically, and they were both paying very little attention to anything else.

The rest of the circle had dissipated, leaving them to their own devices. Deep in conversation, heads inclined toward each other and gazes locked, debating and laughing and yes, flirting in the restrained manner that such a refined setting demanded — so quickly, so perfectly in harmony — Pamela didn't even hear the machine's footsteps approaching until a soft English accent spoke from beside her left shoulder: "Allen?" She knew at once that it must be the LX9, and she had surprised herself with a tiny but needle-sharp stab of jealousy when Allen's gaze shifted immediately and smile of a different quality, even warmer and containing an undeniable quality of tenderness, had lit up his face.

She should have known, then. She should have contrived a graceful exit and walked away. But love, or at least infatuation, is notorious for being blind, and this was the most fascinating man she'd met in ages, so clever and articulate and handsome and wise.

"Ah, Joe!" He reached out to take the drink that the mecha had fetched for him; Pamela clutched her own a little more tightly, amazed by her own impulse to fling it into the robot's eerily symmetrical mask. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome," Joe nodded, but its unblinking eyes were fixed on Pamela's face. _It knows what we were doing,_ she realized with the third shock inside of five seconds. And of course, why wouldn't it? Seduction was its purpose in existing, after all.

Allen turned toward her again, but it was the machine he spoke to, laying a hand on its neatly attired shoulder: "Joe, this is Pamela Cunningham. She's a popular science writer who does freelance work for Cybertronics."

"Hello, Ms. Cunningham." Its gaze flickered to her left hand: no ring. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

 _Chippy!_ The thought was fierce and hot, but she was quickly becoming accustomed to the reaction this thing provoked in her and no trace of it reached her face beyond a slight burning over her cheekbones. She offered a curt nod, purely out of consideration for Allen: it was certainly far more courtesy than a mecha deserved.

For a second their gazes locked, hers and its, and it was a moment of recognition between rivals. Allen's smile was still directed at Joe, but Pamela had known even then that she possessed so much more than a mere collection of circuits and plastic, no matter how cunningly made, could ever hope to match. She offered intellect, and warmth, and laughter, and shared joy. She offered a soul instead of shallow behavioural tricks. She offered, in short, the ocean of humanity as compared to the spiritual desert of the mecha world.

And it had been Joe who had dropped its gaze from hers first, in dumb recognition of the natural order of things. 


	3. Chapter 3

The halls of Allen's fortress were beautiful in their quiet way, just as she'd remembered, but now their calming tones were infused with a subtle bitterness that lingered on Pamela's tongue, along with a growing apprehension concerning what she might find at the end of her journey from the northern copter bay. Asheed had asked her over the phone if she needed someone to escort her to Allen's workshop, and she had replied no, that she knew the way; and since Asheed had sent a pass-badge with the copter pilot that would grant her entry to the secured levels of the Research Centre she went unchallenged by the guardians of this place, both living and inert. A mecha porter walked three steps behind her, carrying the two large suitcases she'd brought with her, and unlike some robots she'd encountered in the past it had the rare good sense to keep its mouth appropriately shut.

The expensive carpet muffled the clicks of her high-heeled shoes to inaudibility, and the few people she passed on her journey didn't seem inclined to look her in the eyes. Asheed had mentioned that people had been talking about her parting with Allen, and she tried not to wonder exactly what they might have been saying: surely, given Allen's position here, her side of the matter hadn't exactly been given a fair hearing… but did they know the nature of the wedge that had come between them, in spite of the very real desire that had drawn them together with the force of two magnets of opposite polarity?

 _Real._ What she'd had with Allen had been real, not an illusion or a counterfeit. How could anybody, hearing any version of what had happened, judge her negatively for her responses? How could they possibly doubt, for a single instant, that she'd been within her rights to insist that artificiality could never be as —

A female voice from behind her, manifestly organic, interrupted her train of thought: "Ms. Cunningham…?"

She paused and turned, the name attached to that voice clicking into place before she caught sight of the woman it belonged to, who had just emerged from an elevator: April Estevez, one of Allen's three graduate students in the current rotation. The petite twenty-four year old was carrying several boxes of sufficient size that she was barely managing them all; they didn't seem particularly heavy, but they were bulky, and Pamela moved at once to take the topmost ones from her arms. As she did so the clear scent of food wafted out of them, and the student smiled at her in gratitude.

"Thanks," April said, and shifted the remaining boxes to get a more secure grip on them. The smile faded as her gaze grew questioning. "Is the Professor expecting you?"

"I —" Such a simple question, but it provoked a startling surge of pain that momentarily closed Pamela's throat: only a week ago, the answer would have been a joyful and unequivocal _Yes_. But now… "One of his colleagues got in touch with me this morning and asked me to come and see him." Deciding that beating around the bush would just waste everyone's time, she came straight to the point: "I was told that he's in a bad way. Is that true? And if so, how — "

"A bad way?" Her head tilted in a manner that was oddly familiar, her brown eyes becoming even more penetrating. It took Pamela a moment to remember where she'd last seen that particular mannerism. "Didn't they, whoever 'they' are, tell you what's happened to Joe?"

"No." It was a well-practiced tactic, to claim lack of knowledge in order to elicit information from a source. "Just that something _had_ happened."

"It's —" She visibly caught herself, gave Pamela one more second of intense study, then turned to continue up the hallway. "The Professor should tell you himself — if he'll see you at all." A sidelong glance, unreadable. "No offence, but he's not exactly in the mood for visitors right now. Any visitors."

Pamela nodded. "I understand," she concurred, although in truth she didn't, in truth she wanted to rush to Allen's inner sanctum and grab him by the shoulders and shake him out of whatever obsessive fugue state he was in, to scream at him: _See me, damn you! I'm here! I'm real! I'm_ alive _, and I love you!_

Another glance, and a slight softening of that sharp regard. "No," April said, "I don't think you do. But Professor Hobby will explain it, if he's…" 

There was genuine distress in those dark eyes now in spite of her carefully disciplined expression, and Pamela gently followed up the unfinished sentence, questing for intel. "Miss Estevez, all I want to do is help him. That's why I came all this way. Can you tell me anything, anything at all, that might help me to understand?"

For a few steps April was silent, but at last she said: "You have to understand, we all _like_ Joe. He's so quick, and so intelligent for a mecha, and he's never been far from the Professor's side. He's been a better assistant than any of us thought a lover-robot could ever be. But the Professor…" Hesitation, as if weighing her own words, then a quiet rush: "He — really cares about him. And the thought that he might not be able to restore his mind is absolutely killing him."

"I was told that the problem has something to do with interrupt prompts not being serviced." Whatever was in the boxes was quite fragrant; she was becoming aware that it would be difficult to get the food-scent out of her expensive suit, and if any grease leaked through from the boxes it would be the devil's own spawn to clean. "Is that accurate?" 

"It's complicated," April responded, but to Pamela's experienced investigator's eye she was clearly hedging. "Like I said, the Professor should tell you himself."

The words _If he wants to_ hung in the air, unspoken, and Pamela elected to let the matter pass for the moment. She spent the rest of their brief and silent journey feeling like a knight being led by a page to the throne room of the king: fallen from royal favour but unbowed, determined to win back the regard of her sovereign. It was a conceit that lasted right up until they exited the common hallway, went through an inner waiting room and a final set of doors, and from there into the dual-levelled workshop that was Allen's own — and she finally saw the man himself, and all pretence of detachment was instantly driven from her in a rush of sorrow, longing, sympathy, outrage… and helpless, hopeless, enduring love. 


	4. Chapter 4

She saw him from across the room, and she instantly forgot about everything else.

He should have looked different, now that she knew what he was really like — but he didn't, not fundamentally, or perhaps her admiration for him had simply survived the crushing revelation of his deep and pathetic perversity. Certainly he was not the neatly groomed and perfectly composed man she'd pursued in Minneapolis and fallen hard for within thirty seconds of meeting him: today he was sitting hunched over at a monitor station on the lower level of his workshop, intent on a rank of screens to the obvious exclusion of all else, unshaven and wearing a rumpled off-white lab coat that looked like it had been slept in at least once. Pamela could see the curve of the screens on the other side of him, full of small cascading symbols that she recognized as mecha cube architecture code, and furthermore she could see that there were white elements scattered through the green flow that were being pointed out by the young man leaning over Allen's left shoulder. He spared no glance for those who had just entered, and Pamela wasted no time in setting down her burden on the nearest flat surface and heading down the stairs toward him, her heart risen into her throat and throbbing there like a wounded bird.

God help her! His profile still cut her to the core like a knife, slowing her approach almost to the point of hesitation. In spite of her preoccupation the part of her mind trained to record any conversation automatically noted what the male grad student (his name was Brian Cooper, she recalled absently) was saying: "… you can see the tertiary filter is catching eighty-seven percent of the track remnants on the first pass."

"It's not enough." Allen sounded distracted, even though his attention was apparently fully on what the Brian was indicating. "Get it up to a least ninety-eight percent, then we'll take it out of simulation."

"Yes, Professor." Brian didn't look happy, but he nodded, and Allen rose from the chair and turned toward Pamela's position to come around the station's side —

— and looked up, his eyes meeting hers. It stopped them both in their tracks, and Pamela knew that she was staring just as he was staring. She could only hope that his heart was racing as hers was racing, and that he felt the same swell of raw emotion in his breast while he gazed at her, as unblinking as any mecha.

"Pamela," he said at last, his tone unreadable even to her highly tuned reporter's senses. He cocked his head a little to one side, and finally blinked at her, and raised his right hand to slowly smooth his hair on that side. Brian had taken his seat but paused to watch them both, and although Pamela could hear boxes being rearranged on the table she could also feel April's attention upon them. "What… what are you doing here?"

She successfully fought — barely — the urge to go to him and wrap her arms around him; he looked so lost, like a little boy wakened from a nap and not quite sure where he was. Instead she confined her response to a restrained smile and a gentle inflection: "Hello, Allen." She gestured toward the mecha porter who had followed her into the workshop, never taking her eyes from his. "I brought you your things. You left them behind, remember?"

Another blink. With an abruptly sinking heart she realized that Asheed had not, in fact, been overstating the case: Allen was processing at a high rate of speed, that was painfully clear, but he was locked in the reaches of his own mind and scarcely noticing the mundane world around him. "Thank you," he said at last, with a detached politeness that chilled her, and paused, as if waiting for her to take the next step: to leave, ideally, she realized with a deeper pulse of dread.

She deliberately did not. She simply gazed at him, silently pleading with him: _Come on, Allen. Come back to reality. Come back to me…_ Behind her the sound of boxes being unpacked ceased and the sense of being watched increased in intensity. Brian, for his part, was looking at her over Allen's shoulder in a way that could well be a warning. She ignored it, allowing an overt element of yearning to enter her expression instead.

One heartbeat. Two. Three, and Allen spoke, his gaze still fixed on her: "April, Brian, would you excuse us for a moment?"

A pause that was manifestly shocked, then two voices speaking almost as one: "Professor, the food —" "Professor, the filter protocols —"

"Only a moment." He spoke quietly, but they fell instantly silent and moved to obey him. "And take the porter with you, would you?"

As Brian headed past Pamela towards the stairs he gave her a look of undisguised animosity from beneath lowered black eyebrows, his hazel eyes practically ablaze with hostility, but said no word to her. The depth of feeling there was an unpleasant surprise, but then he was gone and the door was opening and closing behind them all, leaving her alone with the man who could still reach inside her and twist her heart around his fingers merely by standing and breathing. The man who was, as Asheed had claimed, so preoccupied with the fate of a machine that he had lost touch with the human beings around him, although as he continued to gaze at her she could see something struggling within him, waking up and stumbling toward human contact.

The wretched machine! She realized that it was in the same room with them — her first sight of Allen had completely claimed her attention until this moment — and her eyes slid sideways almost against her will, to the mecha examination chair that was set in the centre of the lower level. The head of it was toward the window and she could see Joe clearly now that she'd noticed the robot. It lay on its back, its forearms resting on the arms of the chair, and its appearance, previously so neat and sharply dressed, was disconcerting: its clothing, the same suit it had been wearing the last time she'd seen it, was muddy and torn, with fragments of dried mud scattered on the floor beneath the couch, although its pale face with its closed eyes and composed features was clean, as if Allen had carefully wiped away every trace of dirt after it had been arranged in the chair. The thin derma panels that framed its mask had been removed to admit fine conduits inside its head at the temples, presumably to attach to its cube housing, and the overall effect was a disturbing cross between a doll in need of repair and a corpse laid out for burial. The sight of it made the skin on her forearms and the back of her neck crawl, and she hastily looked away again —

But Allen wasn't paying attention to her anymore. His gaze had followed hers, and in his pale eyes she saw the first surge of genuine feeling she'd witnessed from him this day: sorrow and grief so deep that she was stunned by its intensity. Wordlessly she stared as he turned from her and crossed to the chair, to lay his hand on Joe's chest and gaze down at the simulator with —

 _I would give the world to have him look at me like that, just once._  

And a more agonized inner whisper: _Maybe he would have, before…_

She swallowed her own perturbation and managed to address a question not for her own sake, but for Allen's: "What happened?"

"He ran away." So much pain… and guilt, she realized with another jolt. "For my sake, or so he believed. He ran into the woods, where he was found and chased by a group of mecha hunters. They drove him into a quicksand pit, and shot him as he went down."

"Is that how it got —" She wondered what the technically correct term was for whatever had happened to the mecha, and decided to let Allen fill in the blank.

But he shook his head, once, slightly. "No. The gunshot wounds are relatively minor, resulting only in selective paralysis on his left side." His hand moved to the ragged damage on Joe's left shoulder, as if the gentle pressure of his touch could soothe the injury where no blood flowed. "It was the sensory deprivation inside the pit over the course of nearly twenty-four hours that set up an empty resource between his processing paths, resulting in a negative stimulus feedback loop and complete cognitive shutdown."

Pamela ran that data through the filter of her own understanding of mecha functioning, garnered in the course of six years of research from a popular science perspective. "So, it's entered a state equivalent to a human coma?"

A single nod, again the smallest possible movement capable of conveying the requested information. His gaze never wavered from Joe's face.

"But… why?" _Keep him talking. Every second you keep him talking is a second of connection, no matter what the subject._ "Why would it do something like that? Did you —" Her heart blazed and soared. "Did you order it to leave?"

A dry little cough of laughter, and he gestured with his chin toward a small table across from Joe's paralyzed body. "He left a letter for me. Read it, and it will explain —" He closed his eyes briefly, an expression of transcendent desolation. "— everything…"

Curious in spite of herself, Pamela walked over to the table and picked up the piece of paper Allen had indicated. It was a small rectangle of cheap stationary, obviously pulled off a hotel pad — a name vaguely familiar to her, the Sunset Motor Inn, was printed across the top in clear no-nonsense letters at odds with the elegant, almost Victorian quality of the flowing script inscribed in pen below it:

_Dearest Allen:_

_I can’t bear to see you suffer, and I won’t stand between you and the woman you love. Please don’t look for me. Forget that I ever belonged to you, and be happy -- that’s all I could ever wish for._

_Goodbye forever, my darling…_

_Joe_

She read the note over twice before looking up, her brow furrowing in perplexity and distaste. "Who on earth would program a robot to write _that_ kind of letter?"

"Nobody did." He was still gazing down at the mecha's face with haunted eyes. "Nobody ever has. And it wasn't taken from a movie, or a play, or a book, or any other source I could find." Reaching down, he took Joe's unmoving right hand in his own, cradling it and covering it tenderly with his left. "Those words were entirely his own. And so was the motivation. He…" She was appalled to hear his voice, which had never been anything other than perfectly composed even when he had been shouting at her, finally falter and break. "He thought that I belonged with you, another orga, and that I'd be happier without him. And so he ran, just as he'd done before." He closed his eyes, his soft voice harsh with self-recrimination. "I should have seen it coming! I've only I'd —"

"Allen." Pamela spoke firmly — enough was, after all, enough — and put down the note again to cross to the other side of the examination chair, to face him across the body of the machine that had come between them. He didn't even spare her a glance; all his attention was focused on the mechanism, and she could discern the fugitive glitter of unshed tears in his eyes. "Allen, listen to me. You can't blame yourself for whatever it did. If it was malfunctioning —"

"Malfunctioning?" He finally looked up to meet her eyes, his expression incredulous. "Is that what you think happened here?"

"What other explanation is there?" She spared a downward glance for the "lifeless" machine, repressing a shudder at how alien it looked without the derma plates that usually framed its mask. "You and I both know that mecha are entirely defined by their programming. If it acted in such an unpredictable way, it logically follows that it must have been broken."

"Or that he was always capable of so much more than I'd anticipated." His pained gaze returned to the object of his desires and his voice fell to a breathless murmur, as if he scarcely dared to speak the thought aloud: "If I'd only told him… if only…"

Pamela had seen enough. Reaching across the chair, she laid a comforting but firm hand on his upper right arm. "You say it did this because… it thought it was doing you a favour?" The very slightest nod was her reward, and she forged ahead: "Well, maybe it _did_ give you a gift, after all. By taking itself out of the equation it's freed you to turn fully back to the human world." She took up a slow stroking motion, pitching her voice to a persuasive murmur. "Allen, people are starting to take notice — and they're starting to talk. Don't make things worse for yourself by pursuing this impossible obsession. Don't you realize that if the wrong people get wind of this it could mean the end of your career?"

For a long moment Allen said nothing; he simply gazed down at Joe, parsing every detail of that serenely unresponsive face. Pamela was beginning to wonder if he'd even heard her when he finally whispered: "True. But irrelevant." He pressed Joe's hand warmly between his own, then disengaged his left hand and laid it to the mecha's cold cheek, slowly stroking the false cheekbone with the ball of his thumb. "As long as I have enough time — as long as I can save him… that's all that matters now."

She stared at him, unable to believe her ears. "Listen to yourself! You're one of the foremost robotics specialists in the entire world, and you're talking about throwing it all away for —"

"A sensory toy?" His eyes rose to her face, and the icy quality of his gaze almost drove her back a step with its implacable power. At the same time she felt a fierce yearning rise in her breast and her grip on his arm tightened, for this was the Allen Hobby she'd come to know and had fallen in love with: a man possessed of more mental and emotional strength than anyone else she'd ever met. "A simulation of the connection we humans take for granted? He threw himself into a world that was likely to destroy him, all for the sake of my happiness. And nobody taught him how to do it: what he did, he did of his own volition. If you can call that "false", or "mindless", or "worthless", then I really think you should leave — _now._ "


	5. Chapter 5

Pamela's gaze never wavered, but it was a near thing: he was throwing her own words back in her face, after all, a wild despairing cry from their final acrimonious exchange: _How could you even begin to compare it to me — that false, mindless, worthless creature! It's a_ toy, _Allen! You of all people should know that! And you… are not… a child!_

He had flinched then, the iron-spined determination in his eyes briefly flaring into hotter, more painful feeling. She'd been meanly glad to have scored such a palpable hit. He was not flinching now. His shoulders had squared, his back had straightened, and he was looking at her evenly, with a quality of flat warning in his expression that sent a chill rippling down her body — along with something far hotter, because his effortless dominance had always been intensely attractive to her. And it still was, even if he had chosen to wield it against her over something that deserved neither his concern nor his protection.

She did not remove her hand from his bicep either, and let two seconds of silence spin out before replying calmly: "I'm not here to argue with you, Allen. I'm here to help you — if you'll let me. In spite of everything that's happened, I still care about your wellbeing."

"Who sent for you?" He was searching her face now, as if the power of his tremendous intellect alone could pierce the shell of bone shielding her brain and access her secrets. "Thomas Metcaff? Lily Shueng?"

"Asheed Amroliwallah, actually."

His blue eyes narrowed and grew even colder. "I'll have to have a word with him about minding his own —"

"Professor!" A sharp female voice from the upper level interrupted him, and Pamela joined him in glancing up and around to seek its source. A young woman with close-cropped blonde hair had entered through the waiting room doors and was standing at the railing, looking down at them with muddy green eyes and an imperious air. It was Tamara Hahn, the third graduate student currently under Allen's mentorship, and she bore the expression of someone prepared to brook no nonsense whatsoever.

The frown was clear to be heard in his voice: "Tamara, this isn't a good —"

"April has brought you food, and you are not eating it." Her stern voice was inflected with a Germanic accent, slight but distinctive. "I thought we had agreed that you would take meals at regular intervals."

"And I have been." He turned fully towards his accuser, finally removing his hands from the machine and shifting out of reach of Pamela's touch. She drew back her hand and took a small step away from the examination couch, wanting to put some distance between herself and the eerily opened mecha. 

April appeared at Tamara's right shoulder, looking nervous around the edges. "Actually, Professor… I don't think three mouthfuls counts as a meal."

"It doesn't," Brian announced, stepping up on the tall European student's left. He crossed his arms and looked down at Allen with a combination of amusement and firmness. "And that's all he's had since we managed to talk him into having two pieces of toast and a scrambled egg this morning."

Allen's gaze shifted between them, looking for a weak spot in their united front, but even April stood firm in spite of her obvious unease at confronting him. The stubborn set of his features softened fractionally. "All right," he conceded in a warmer voice, and granted Joe a final tender glance, squeezing the machine's unmoving fingers once more before turning back towards the monitoring station. "All right… bring me a bowl of something, and I'll eat it while I fine-tune the post-restart inducer protocols."

"The _whole_ bowl," Tamara insisted, gripping the railing with both hands and leaning forward to reinforce her point with an undisguised glare. Allen raised a hand in mute acknowledgement, his attention already on the computer in front of him as he took his seat… and Pamela was left standing where she was, feeling — and in fact, being — completely ignored by the very man she'd just travelled four hours to help.

She opened her mouth to get Allen's attention again, only to catch sight of April shaking her head emphatically and slashing the air with one hand in a tight little gesture of negation. Brian was looking down at her with black eyebrows drawn together in a belligerent frown, but April caught his eye too and shook her head again. He shrugged and turned away, heading toward the small table laden with food, which Tamara had already reached and where she was briskly finishing the unpacking that April had started.

Dubious, Pamela looked to Allen again — he was completely engrossed in whatever he'd called up on the row of screens, issuing commands in a low obsessive murmur, clearly already a million miles away — and couldn't resist a glance down at Joe, which remained as inert as any other broken piece of machinery. With a final bone-deep shudder of revulsion she turned away herself and headed up the stairs to join the three students around the table, where bowls were being laid out by Tamara (including a fourth place setting, Pamela noted with some slight unwinding of the high-pitched tension binding her core) and food of a vaguely Northeastern Chinese character was being removed from the boxes. 

In less than a minute everything was arranged, glasses of water were poured and the boxes were set neatly aside on the floor. April chose three dishes to sample for Allen's own supper — steamed fish and a hearty mixture of rice and vegetables, topped with three small steamed buns — and stuck a pair of chopsticks upright in it before hastened it down to his work station, while Brian and Tamara took their seats; a brusque nod from Tamara was Pamela's cue to occupy the empty chair next to her, and within seconds April had joined them, flanking Pamela on the right. The grad students dug into the marvellously fragrant spread of food without hesitation and with excellent appetites, but Pamela deliberately held back to let the residents have first choice from the dishes — and to cast a glance at Allen, whose own bowl was sitting beside him on the desk, completely unheeded.

"He won't touch it until one of us importunes him at least once more," Tamara noted wryly in a low voice as she helped herself to a large quantity of wheat noodles in fish sauce. "Eat — Ms. Cunningham, isn't it? You must have travelled a long way to join us, after all."

"My reputation precedes me," Pamela smiled with a touch of irony, because although Brian was directly facing her he seemed disinclined to look at her as he attacked the lamb dish with cumin, and the twist of his mouth suggested that he was tasting something unpleasant. She spoke equally softly, although she doubted that Allen, focussed as he was, would have paid any attention to the conversation even if they were shouting.

April spooned some cornmeal congee into her bowl. "The Professor's spoken very highly of you," she said almost defensively, with a warning glance at her male colleague. "He admires the clarity and the intelligence of your writing, and the way you make technical issues accessible to the general public."

It sounded as if she was quoting directly from the source, and Pamela couldn't help but smile more widely at the praise. "Well, he should certainly be qualified to make that determination: after all, he wrote a very popular book on robotics himself."

"Ah yes," Tamara drawled, " _How Can A Robot Become Human?_ Which was far more popular in Europe than it ever was here."

"I thought the Germans were a dour and unromantic people," Brian remarked, flashing her a gleam of a teasing smile.

Tamara wrinkled her nose. "It was on my mother's bedside table for three months straight, and after that she forced _me_ to read it. I'm amazed it didn't put me off Mecha Studies for the rest of my life."

Pamela, who was about to address the hot pot with fish and tofu, paused to look at her with surprise — and pleasure, because the comment suggested that she might have an ally here. "You didn't like it?"

"Oh, technically it was — what is the British saying? — ah yes, sound as a pound. And the David 2 project certainly proved the Professor's base hypotheses valid. But some of the language he used in conveying his ideas…"

Pamela's lips curved fondly, even as a serpent of bitter hindsight writhed and hissed in her heart. "…was distinctly romantic, yes. I didn't read the book until after I'd met him at the Minneapolis conference, and I was surprised to discover that he was a poet as well as a scientist."

"You'd have to be a bit of both," Brian said, "to have come up with something as audacious as David 2." He still wasn't looking at her, but at least he was responding to her conversational gambits, which was a distinct improvement as far as she was concerned. " _The transcendent power of abstraction that will one day transform mecha into orga…_ " He cast a narrow glance to his own right, toward Joe's motionless form. "I don't think he ever expected to find it in anything he hadn't designed and built himself, though."

Tamara grimaced again prior to ingesting a hearty bite of noodles, and Pamela decided it was time to redirect the conversation to something less potentially distressing to herself personally. She turned to the European and stated: "I get the feeling you don't approve of this situation."

"I don't," Tamara said bluntly, and reached for a steamed pork bun. "But I also know a man in love when I see one, and I don't intend to waste my time or his trying to talk him out of it."

Pamela couldn't help but stare at her as if the blonde had just delivered a ringing slap to her cheek, and tried not to let any of them see how the words had stricken her to the heart; judging by the satisfied expression on Brian's face, however, he at least had not missed the effect. April, her gaze downcast, sighed and picked at her food. "It's just so _sad,_ " she said in an even quieter voice, with a brief glance toward the lower level where a man worked relentlessly on behalf of a machine, ignoring even food and sleep. "Joe's mind is probably gone, but the Professor just won't give up."

"It might not be," Brian corrected her, "if we can filter out the track remnants and prevent him from going recursive on restart." 

Pamela shook her head, letting a questioning look cross her face. "And what, exactly, are track remnants?"

A superior little smirk touched Brian's narrow lips, but April dove right in. "Joe's behavioural matrix is unusually complex, even for an AC-3 cube. The sensory deprivation in the quicksand pit set up negative feedback between his primary and secondary processing paths, something that wouldn't have been a problem with an ordinary mecha, but with Joe… well, it was a _major_ problem. He tried to remedy the stimulation gap by accessing his older memory archives, which would have worked in the short term, but we didn't locate him quickly enough, and he completely gave up on servicing the interrupt prompts because doing so would only result in an empty resource between the processing paths  And now all the archives he accessed are seeded with trace imprints of the increasing intensity of the negative feedback loops induced by the lack of external input."

"What she means is that if we try to reinitialize Joe's cube without eliminating all traces of the cognitive 'pain' he experienced in the pit as his processing paths tried to maintain a functional level of stimulation, he'll just get sucked back into 'reliving' the accelerating process of cognitive dissonance," Brian explained. He finally met Pamela's gaze directly, and his expression was grim, as if daring her to make a remark out of turn. "I'd give him three minutes to a critical freeze, tops — and if that happens, it's game over."

"We only have one chance at this," Tamara added after swallowing a large bite of bun. "And Professor Hobby has spent the last week stacking as many cards as possible in our favour."

Brian smiled again, this time ruefully, and there was pride in his expression as he looked again toward Allen's station. "I've never seen someone code a remnant filter that fast, especially accounting for the variables of a secondary processing path. I didn't think it _could_ be done that quickly."

" _Liebe macht den Unmöglichen möglich,_ " Tamara observed, prior to finishing her bun and attending to her noodles again. "And besides, you'd be hard pressed to find a more brilliant man than the Professor, at least when it comes to robotics." She looked toward the lower level, the cant of her heavy eyebrows turning speculative. "When it comes to his heart, however…"

"They seemed… well, happy," April protested, before glancing guiltily at Pamela, as if caught telling secrets.

"They were," Brian said curtly as he pushed back his chair. "Until an unexpected variable entered the equation and things changed for the worse. I'd better get back to coding that filter protocol. We're running out of time as it is." He drained his glass and rose and headed down the stairs without a backward glance, to settle himself in the chair at the workstation next to Allen's and set right to work.

April sighed again and pushed aside her half-full bowl. Tamara looked at her affectionately and pushed the bowl back. "Eat," she said in the gentlest tone Pamela had yet heard her employ. "The Professor can ignore my demands with impunity, but I can — and I will — sit on you and spoon food down your throat if necessary."

But April's attention wasn't on the bowl in front of her. She was staring down at Allen's workstation. "Look," she whispered, and Pamela and Tamara both turned to follow her gaze.

Allen was still intent on the screens, still issuing verbal commands and still tapping the interfaces… but he was doing it one-handed. He'd pulled the bowl closer and was now eating in a slow but steady progression of small mouthfuls, paying no apparent attention to selecting what he was putting into his mouth… but at least he _was_ eating.

Pamela could clearly hear the pleased purr in Tamara's voice: "Well, Ms. Cunningham… it seems that your arrival has produced a salutary effect after all."


	6. Chapter 6

Night fell quickly beyond the high windows of Allen's workshop: by the time April had finished her bowl of food (cheered by the knowledge that her mentor was also substantially nourishing himself for the first time in days), the banners of grey clouds that streaked the autumn sky were almost indistinguishable from the darkness beyond, and spot-lighting had activated all over the large room to provide illumination at the work stations — and over the mecha's body, which in Pamela's opinion only enhanced the funeral parlour atmosphere. She helped April clear away the dishes into the boxes but was content to let Tamara assist in carting them back to the kitchens: she had no intention of leaving Allen's territory now that she'd gained entrance, for she still anticipated that he might not let her back in again if she left it.

"Why don't you simply have some of the Company mecha bring you food and tidy up afterwards?" she asked the girls in a low voice as she helped to stack the boxes in their arms.

April shook her head decisively. "The Professor doesn't want anyone or anything not directly involved with this project to access the workspace."

"Even mecha tell tales," Tamara glowered. "Especially when the people controlling them see a profit to be made in spreading gossip."

Pamela glanced up at the ceiling of the room, where certain structural details made concealment of monitoring devices quite possible. "But surely Cybertronics has security cameras installed in every room?"

April smiled indulgently, and Tamara snorted. "Please! The Professor has _that_ much influence, at least. No gaze that he has not approved is permitted to enter this room."

They went away then, leaving Pamela to savour the inference she could take from that statement: that she was among the approved, permitted to be near Allen at a time of such stress and preoccupation. Comforted, she set herself to quietly investigating the space as well as she could without getting close enough to the two intently working men to disturb them. The workshop turned out to have a large walk-in closet full of lab coats and assorted articles of men's clothing, as well as a bathroom with a long mirror over a row of sinks, three toilets in stalls, and a small shower; both rooms were accessed from the opposite side of the workshop space from Allen's work station, off the upper level. She found some extra hangers in the closet and used them for her own clothes, then tucked her suitcase into a corner of the storage space where she could easily access it. Asheed had given her a billet in one of the Research Centre's guest quarters, but the lingering intuition that it would be a bad idea to leave for any significant length of time remained, and she intended to stay here unless Allen took the step of having her physically removed.

The sight of the men's clothing in the closet gave her a nasty moment's pause, because they were so clearly Allen's: the cardigans and vests of muted yellows and browns, the comfortable khaki pants, the shirts in tones of ivory and eggshell… and one anomalous item, a stylish dove-grey suit and brilliantly white shirt hanging just beyond Allen's collection, with a pair of gleaming shoes in a complementary shade set set neatly beneath it. The cut was too slim for Allen's broader build, and she realized at once that it had been brought in for Joe, if and when the mecha was ever fit to dress itself again. Its proximity to the clothing intended for the body of the man she loved disturbed her in ways difficult to express but nevertheless profound, and she found herself reaching out and edging them apart by a span of six or so inches — a small distance, but enough to comfort her heart which ached anew. For an instant she experienced a totally mad impulse to bring her own clothes over from the other side of the closet and insert them between those of her love and that of the machine.

_How many suits does it have in Allen's own closet? Do they keep their socks in the same drawer? Does it wear underwear, or —_

She pushed the questions roughly from her mind and turned away, dismissing the urge to perform such sympathetic magic as pointless and childish, but she couldn't silence the memory of Tamara's words as easily: _I know a man in love when I see one…_

And she knew then that Allen's closet was at least half given over to clothes cut for a slender agile body whose contours he could trace from memory alone, objects crafted to flatter another object, a deceptively alluring warmth where no blood coursed and no heart beat. And simultaneously she experienced a powerful and satisfying vision: herself laying hands upon that dove-grey suit and casting it into the waste bin, because it would never be worn again and Allen had turned to her to do what he could not bear to do himself.

***********************************************

When Tamara and April returned some time later they brought two sizeable urns with them on a rolling tea cart, along with ten big cups and enough loose tea, cream and sugar to sustain a far larger crew than currently occupied the workshop. 

"I know how the Professor takes his coffee," Pamela suggested, and they seemed content to let her prepare it for them — three sugar, just enough cream to tint the blackness — and take it down to his work station while they attended to their own beverages and to Brian's. Allen was intently engaged in managing information on six different screens, keeping up a steady murmured litany of commands in an arcane programming language that Pamela did not recognize while simultaneously inputting data via a keyboard, but he paused and glanced at her sidelong when she came up beside him and quietly set the steaming cup down at his right hand.

She offered him a friendly smile in return. "Drink it while it's hot," she advised, remembering (with a pang of regret like the glide of a razor) how he'd always made fresh coffee every time he wanted it because he hated having it cold.

The suspicious quality of his expression thawed ever so slightly, and he nodded, the tiniest inclination of his chin. "Thank you," he said in a voice that sounded rusty from disuse in spite of his near-constant vocalizations over the past half hour.

"You're welcome." She considered touching his shoulder, but there was still an aura of glacial remoteness about him that forbade it. "I'll bring you more when you're ready for it."

He did not question her fitness to know his needs so intimately, merely nodded again and turned back to his work without a trace of a smile — but to Pamela, it felt as if a sheet of ice lying between them had cracked, like a mirror, from side to side with a report audible to the ends of the earth. 

***********************************************

She spent most of the evening curled up in a chair on the second level, behind April and Tamara's work stations and in Allen's direct line of sight, reading a book of children's stories pulled from one of the shelves that lined the room. It was bound in antique leather and its pages breathed the perfume of aged paper, and when she opened it at random her eyes fell upon a story at once comfortingly familiar and horribly pertinent:

_THERE was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming._

_There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten._

She flipped away from it quickly, seeking more pleasant diversions, but found her fingers turning back to it again and again as the evening progressed, drawn by its painful but undeniable resonance.

_"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"_

_"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."_

_"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit._

_"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."_

_"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"_

The four mecha specialists worked steadily and for the most part without speaking; only once in a while would one of them approach Allen to consult with him, and again Pamela was at a loss to understand their technical tricks of speech. But the gravity of their demeanour was unmistakeable, focussed on the creature that lay in the centre of their circle with conduits running from its head and its expression seemingly carved of flawless marble, unknowable and unknowing.

_That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the Boy's bed. At first he found it rather uncomfortable, for the Boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe. And he missed, too, those long moonlight hours in the nursery, when all the house was silent, and his talks with the Skin Horse. But very soon he grew to like it, for the Boy used to talk to him, and made nice tunnels for him under the bedclothes that he said were like the burrows the real rabbits lived in. And they had splendid games together, in whispers, when Nana had gone away to her supper and left the night-light burning on the mantelpiece. And when the Boy dropped off to sleep, the Rabbit would snuggle down close under his little warm chin and dream, with the Boy's hands clasped close round him all night long._

_And so time went on, and the little Rabbit was very happy–so happy that he never noticed how his beautiful velveteen fur was getting shabbier and shabbier, and his tail becoming unsewn, and all the pink rubbed off his nose where the Boy had kissed him._

She rose at regular intervals to refresh Allen's coffee. She accepted his nods with a smile that offered warmth for his coldness, and with the fifth cup she was rewarded with the slightest curve of his lips in return.

At last Brian, who had been yawning for the last hour with increasing frequency, dragged himself out of his chair and half-stumbled to Allen's side, wearing a chagrined expression. "Professor, I'm starting to have trouble seeing straight. I can't concentrate enough to guarantee I'm not making some major errors."

Allen didn't look up, but he inclined his head slightly in Brian's direction. "Go and get some sleep."

A frown of clear concern. "You should really be —"

Now he looked up, to fix the young man with a gaze that silenced him at once. "I'll expect you back here in nine hours."

After a moment Brian nodded reluctantly and dropped the subject. "Yes, Professor." He cast an apologetic glance at April and Tamara, then raised his hand in a half-salute to them and took his leave.

The sub-audible hum of exceptional intelligence harnessed to a desperately pointless cause descended once more.

_Spring came, and they had long days in the garden, for wherever the Boy went the Rabbit went too. He had rides in the wheelbarrow, and picnics on the grass, and lovely fairy huts built for him under the raspberry canes behind the flower border. And once, when the Boy was called away suddenly to go out to tea, the Rabbit was left out on the lawn until long after dusk, and Nana had to come and look for him with the candle because the Boy couldn't go to sleep unless he was there. He was wet through with the dew and quite earthy from diving into the burrows the Boy had made for him in the flower bed, and Nana grumbled as she rubbed him off with a corner of her apron._

_"You must have your old Bunny!" she said. "Fancy all that fuss for a toy!"_

_The Boy sat up in bed and stretched out his hands._

_"Give me my Bunny!" he said. "You mustn't say that. He isn't a toy. He's REAL!"_

_When the little Rabbit heard that he was happy, for he knew that what the Skin Horse had said was true at last. The nursery magic had happened to him, and he was a toy no longer. He was Real. The Boy himself had said it._

_That night he was almost too happy to sleep, and so much love stirred in his little sawdust heart that it almost burst. And into his boot-button eyes, that had long ago lost their polish, there came a look of wisdom and beauty, so that even Nana noticed it next morning when she picked him up, and said, "I declare if that old Bunny hasn't got quite a knowing expression!"_

Memories surfaced, unbidden and unwelcome: the way Allen had so often looked at the mecha, affectionately, with pleasure — and the way the mecha had looked back at him, its unblinking eyes bright with something unreadable that she had always deemed completely irrelevant. A hundred such glances, a silence beneath the commonplace words that might have been...

It was impossible, of course. Fairy tales bore no relation to reality. But Pamela nevertheless raised her trembling hand from the page and pressed her fingertips to her closed eyelids, both to momentarily shut out the sight of Allen's gaunt grim exhaustion and to banish the threatening sting of savage tears.


	7. Chapter 7

Allen lasted for less than an hour and a half after the departure of his Cognitive Engineering student before grinding to a halt; Pamela only spotted it when she looked up from her book (by now she'd moved on to Voltaire's _The Maid of Orleans_ in preference to disturbingly metaphorical children's stories) to find him leaning back in his chair with his head tipped back against the rest and his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open and his right hand still loosely clasping the cup of coffee on his desk, as if he'd been conquered by sleep in the midst of battling it.

At once she set aside the volume and unfolded herself from her armchair, hastening around to the stairs and down them to reach his side. He didn't move a muscle at her approach; save for the slight rise and fall of his shirt-clad chest, he might as well have been dead.

"Allen." No trace of reaction to her whisper. After a moment's hesitation she laid her hand on his shoulder, half-thrilled and half-fearful of his response to her touch, but he only turned his head a little away from her and slept on. "Allen?"

"Professor Hobby!" Tamara's voice once again rang out, and she rose from her work station, but Allen did not respond. It wasn't until the grad student had come right up on his other side and actually shaken his shoulder herself that he uttered a soft groan of protest. "All right, _mein Herr_ , it's time for bed. _Macht schnell!"_

Allen opened his blue eyes narrowly and levelled a look at her both defiant and transcendently weary. "I'm fine," he muttered petulantly, "just —" Then promptly spoiled his protest with a wide yawn that he barely managed to cover in time with his left hand. 

Tamara nodded, her tone shifting to a coaxing murmur. "Yes. I completely agree. You're in absolutely _excellent_ condition." She raised her eyes to Pamela's face and nodded again, slipping her right hand under Allen's left bicep; Pamela at once followed suit on the opposite side, and applied gentle upward pressure. "And you'll only be that much more brilliant after you've lain down for a few hours." She directed a quiet command at the work station itself: "Computer, pause work flow."

His eyes widened in alarm, and Pamela saw with a sinking heart that it was nearly delirious in its intensity. "I can't — Joe —"

"— will be just fine, with us watching over him." She applied stronger pressure, enough to half-pull the drowsy man from his seat with Pamela's help. "Now come along: he'd want you to get some sleep, wouldn't he? In fact he'd scold you for letting yourself get this far gone."

"Yes…" Almost a sob, but he allowed her to guide him around the end of the work station and towards the stairs, his gait the stumble of a drunken man. 

"How fortunate, then, that you have grad students to take up the slack in his absence."

Pamela was peripherally aware of April's gaze on them, frowning, but she was too busy concentrating on helping Allen to pay much attention to anything else, letting Tamara lead them both to a long couch against the eastern wall of the workshop's second level. It bore a pillow that looked like it had scarcely been slept on and a thick plaid blanket loosely draped over its back; Tamara, with businesslike efficiency that suggested she'd done this several times before, got Allen seated upon it and then guided him to lie down on his left side, not even trying to take off his lab coat, while Pamela concerned herself with unfolding the blanket and arranging it warmly over him. He was facing the well of the workshop, and as she tucked in the woollen covering around his shoulders he opened his eyes enough to cast a final yearning gaze downwards. What he saw there seemed to rally his energies, for he tried to sit up.

"... no time… I can't…"

"You can," Tamara said firmly, "and you will." She put her hand back on his shoulder just long enough to convince him to lie down fully. "We will continue the work for you, never fear."

Pamela's heart, already badly cracked, broke open and spilled such fierce longing grief into every vein that she nearly sobbed herself. Instead she reached down and stroked Allen's head, smoothing the rumpled hair over his right temple. Even in his currently dishevelled condition it was as fine and as silken as she remembered, prompting a cry of white-hot pain from her body and her soul.

"Go to sleep, Allen," she whispered, trying to sound calmly soothing; to her own ears it was a cry of barely restrained misery. She stroked him again, but his eyes had already fallen closed and she did not know if he even heard her: "We'll be right here. You're not alone…"

Looking up at Tamara, she saw the grad student smile faintly and nod once. Touching Allen was a balm to her wounded spirit, but she reluctantly removed her hand and turned away, although in truth she would have liked nothing better than to sit on the floor beside him and take his hand, to offer him whatever comfort she could while he slept. 

That, however, was the act of a lover, and he had made it clear that he had withdrawn that right from her purview. So instead she followed Tamara back to the lower level, with a stop for cups of coffee along the way. Neither of them seemed inclined to speak; it wasn't until they were at Tamara's work station and the mecha specialist had settled into her chair, her mug cradled in both hands and her gaze pensively directed at the frozen flow of data on her screens, that Pamela made an observation.

"He's very lucky to have you." She glanced back at April, who was again intent on her own work. "All of you."

Tamara shrugged. "He's a man who inspires great loyalty in those around him. I don't think you'd find more than a handful of his students who wouldn't do exactly the same, without needing to be asked."

The thought prompted another surge of pain at all she had lost, and she covered it with a slow mouthful of coffee, hoping that her eyes were not glistening too obviously and permitting herself only a single observation out of the multitude that crowded into her throat: "He's an utterly remarkable man."

"The Professor is a man of science, one of the greatest of our age, but he is also an incurable romantic." She looked toward Joe's inert form, still neatly arranged in the examination chair. "Which is obvious, of course — otherwise he wouldn't have fallen in love with a machine, believing it capable of so much more than its function."

There it was again, so baldly stated, like a knife to Pamela's heart! Could it be that Tamara had no idea what affect her words were having? "Then you agree that he's deceiving himself."

Tamara leaned back in her chair, letting it take her weight fully, and tapped well-manicured nails on the sides of her coffee cup. "April and Brian would not say so," she finally observed in a speculative tone, "based upon their observations of the pair of them over the past several months. Myself, I am of a far more pragmatic turn of mind; also, I deal with the physical structures of mecha, not their cognition. Therefore I am not qualified to make such a determination. But I respect the expertise of my colleagues — and there is the letter Joe wrote, which transcends the inexplicable and verges on the miraculous." Another shrug, brief and rueful. "Perhaps the Professor was on to something after all."

Pamela wasn't about to let that pass without challenge. "But surely someone, somewhere, must have programmed lover-robots to write sentimental letters?"

The blonde nodded at once. "The Belladerma TRX-1238 line possesses such a function, yes, but there is a great deal of difference between a trite compilation of pre-fabricated phrases and what amounts to a declaration of suicide in the name of devotion to an individual." She sat up straighter with the air of one preparing to address a lesson to a student of dubious attentiveness, although Pamela's gaze was resolutely focussed upon her. "You must understand that mecha behaviour is largely determined by initial programming, but that certain models and individual members of the species are sensitive to modification based not upon intuition, but upon probability calculations extrapolated from personal experience — and given Joe's previous adventure with running away and ending up at a Flesh Fair, there is no reason not to believe that he did not conceive that as the most likely outcome of his decision to leave the Professor."

Pamela smiled narrowly over the rim of her coffee cup. "I may not be a mecha specialist, but even I know that they have very little sense of self-preservation. If a human being told one to step in front of an oncoming truck it would do it without hesitation, and you certainly don't hear them pleading for their lives at Flesh Fairs."

"Actually, Joe attempted to escape when he was being pulled onto the stage after encountering David 2 — yet another anomaly in the profile of an already very strange machine." A dry smile quirked one corner of her wide mouth. "Brian is practically salivating at the prospect of examining his motivational engine more closely, assuming he survives this experience more or less intact."

Curious, Pamela elected to increase the signal of personal intimacy; she shifted from an upright standing posture to settle her hip on the end of the desk, cradling her cup in both hands in a mirroring gesture. "And what do you stand to gain from all this?"

"Experience," Tamara responded instantly. "What the Professor is doing may be only tangental to my own line of specialization — after all, Joe's physical damage is relatively minor — but this is teaching me a great deal about mecha cognitive and behavioural design." A wave of her right hand before returning it to her cup. "Oh, I studied such matters in university, of course, but there's nothing like a real-world problem to bring certain things into sharper focus."

"And that's all this is to you." She was remembering April's earnestness and Brian's anger, comparing them to this woman's calm and practical demeanour.

To her surprise, Tamara actually sighed aloud and briefly closed her eyes. "To Brian, Joe has become a fascinating puzzle that may yield data of a type he has never seen before. To April, he is the Professor's dearest companion, and because she adores the Professor she values Joe as well." A thoughtful pause; then she opened her eyes and glanced away at the screens with their frozen data streams. "To me, he is… unique in my experience, certainly, and clearly beloved by the Professor, who knows far too much about how mecha are made to be tricked by the commonplace counterfeits they create. Therefore I can only conclude that he has more to offer than the standard simulations that lover-mecha are capable of." She raised the coffee cup to her lips again, pausing briefly to direct an evaluating glance at Pamela, holding eye contact as she took a slow sip. "You know that talk is circulating at all levels of this facility? And at higher levels as well?"

Pamela nodded grimly. "It's part of the reason Mr. Amroliwallah sent for me."

Tamara nodded in turn. "There are already rumours of severe repercussions for this. Employees of the Firm, even ones as prestigious as Allen Hobby, are not supposed to get caught in the web of illusions we're in the business of weaving. For a member of the general public to become inappropriately enamoured of a companion mecha is one thing, but in his case —"

"I've tried to tell him that," Pamela interjected, now feeling both genuinely aggrieved and relieved to have found a sympathetic ear, "but he won't listen to me!" A bitter little snort, and she took a sip of coffee herself. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. He's been fixated on that thing for as long as I've known him. It's… well, it's pathetic — in a way that's purely tragic," she hastened to add.

"Fixated?" Tamara was looking at her more searchingly. "Yes — and no. This is no mere case of addiction, I think, or of robosexuality. The Professor's suffering appears far more than simply physical." 

"Oh, I think that's exactly what it is." Her gaze turned toward the exhausted man collapsed on the couch overhead, but she deliberately redirected her attention to the somber grad student before she could quite glimpse his painfully drawn face. "He's exhibiting classic signs of addiction, including the willingness to throw away everything in pursuit of the next fix — his friends, his family his career, and yes, even his health."

But Tamara shook her head decisively. "I disagree, strongly. An addict takes the easy way out, and would, I think, have simply scrapped Joe by now and picked up another of the same model, to keep things quiet if nothing else. To an addict, one dose of poison is as good as another. An addict does not work himself to death for a week straight to save something that he could easily get an identical copy of — and when he does go to such lengths on behalf of an individual, we do not call that addiction, do we?"

Pamela felt an unattractive scowl settling on her features, the question drawn reluctantly from her depths, compelled by a reporter's instinct for the truth and resisted by every instinct she possessed as a woman: "Then what, exactly, would you call it?"

Tamara smiled faintly, in the manner of one acknowledging her own victory. "If Joe were human, we would call it love, would we not?"

"Well-adjusted people do not love machines," Pamela stated flatly.

"How odd." She put aside her coffee and turned back to her screens, still with that Mona Lisa curve on her lips. "Joe said much the same thing in a very similar tone of voice, once upon a time. And it would appear that in this case you are both wrong together."


	8. Chapter 8

A raised voice, shrill and aggrieved, roused Pamela from an uneasy sleep. 

" — that's what you think, then take your stuff and clear out! We don't need you if you're —"

"Calm down, kid! And for God's sake, lower your voice! That's not what I was saying at all, and you know it."

She lay very still — or rather sat, for she had fallen asleep in the armchair, awkwardly slumped over with _The Maid of Orleans_ still in her lap. The voices from the lower level of the workshop were quieter now and overlaid by the faint hiss of the shower running in the bathroom, but Pamela had always possessed excellent hearing and that gift had not faded appreciably as she aged. She shifted just enough to alleviate the kink in her neck somewhat and listened intently, keeping her eyes closed in case one of grad students glanced in her direction.

Tamara's voice now, dry and droll. "If you're worried about _her_ , she was up half the night watching over the Professor and is as deeply asleep now as he was ten minutes ago. And really, Brian? Because that sounded exactly like what you were saying."

"Don't you start in on me! Look… Amroliwallah's taken enough of an interest to bring _her_ into the picture, to try and convince him that he should abandon the project, right? And if Amroliwallah has his nose out of joint about this, you can believe that Shueng and the rest of the shareholders do too. Hell, they probably told him to do it in the first place."

"Well, she's not going to get very far!" April said heatedly. "The Professor will throw her out on her ear if she tries, and she's never going to convince him that Joe's not worth —"

Brian sighed sharply. "All right, all right… I can't deny he's dedicated. But I have to admit that she's already done some good: he slept more last night  than he's slept in the last week, and he actually seemed to see me when I came in this morning instead of looking through me with that thousand mile stare of his. Now all he has to do is show some interest in breakfast and we can give her a hat trick."

Tamara drawled: "Far be it from me to impute humanitarian motives to the owners of the Company —" A snort of laughter from Brian. "— but it occurs to me that they may also be thinking of his future functionality if the cube turns out to be fried. He's going to need someone to turn to, ready to support him in his grief, and she _was_ his lover, was she not? Clearly she still possesses affection for him as well as attraction, and I'd say the feeling is mutual."

A pause, then April, sounding outraged: "That's…!"

"It only makes sense," Tamara continued equitably. "It's certainly what I would do in their position. You saw yourself how he cared for her, during her previous visit, and how he responded to her last night. Such feelings are difficult to completely kill."

A mutter from Brian: "I wonder what the hell happened between the three of them…"

Pamela could clearly picture Tamara crossing her arms with finality. "It's all there in the letter: the Professor chose Joe, and Joe decided that he had made the wrong choice — and set out to make it right."

"It's all so crazy…" April half-moaned. 

Another snort. "Crazy or not, we're stuck in the middle of it. All I'm saying is that we might like to have careers left ahead of us when this is over."

"Has it occurred to you that we have all the prestige of mushrooms, growing in the shadow of a mighty oak?" Tamara inquired. "If they come to chop the tree down, they're not going to be paying attention to us, I assure you."

"Maybe not — but they can certainly trample us underfoot in the process."

April leaped to the attack at once: "You can say whatever you want: I'm not leaving the Professor to deal with this alone!"

"Nor I," Tamara agreed.

The frown was clear to be heard in Brian's voice: "I thought you didn't approve of —"

"How can I get it through your thick skull that my approval has nothing to do with this?" Tamara snapped. "He could care less what I think, or what anyone else thinks for that matter."

"Then why're you taking the risk?"

"Because I was taught that one is loyal to one's superiors, and Hobby has been an excellent teacher to all of us for these past ten months. If I can do him this service in exchange for all the effort he has put into educating me well, then I will do it, and be glad for the privilege."

"Oh God…" Brian's groan was imprecatory. "They're going to destroy him, and we'll all end up as collateral damage."

"He's too powerful," April said with confidence. "And even if they drove him out of here, he'd find plenty of other companies eager to take him in."

"To expel him for the crime of becoming enthralled with a robot would be extremely short-sighted of the Firm," Tamara mused. "The man is inarguably a genius. He's already produced innovations that have made Cybertronics millions of dollars. And, his mentoring program is second to none. Who really cares who or what he sleeps with, or loves, when all is said and done?"

"Amroliwallah, Shueng, and a lot of other people with the power to grind us into the dust," Brian countered unhappily.

There was a moment of silence before Tamara spoke again. "Brian… you're a brilliant man in your own right, but you could talk the hind legs off a donkey. Either stay or go. Which is it to be?"

Another pause, full of tension. "… Aw, hell. I'm staying. You know that. The Professor's already taught me more about CE than I've learned from all my other instructors combined."

"And I'm not abandoning him when he needs us most!" April declared.

"Nor I," Tamara concluded. "So it's settled, then. Brian, for having put us through such a convoluted conversation so early in the morning, you are hereby ordered to go and get us all breakfast."

"Oh, come _on…_ "

"You're also the best rested among us. Now run along: I'm getting hungrier by the minute." 

More grumbling, this time too low for individual words to be distinguished, but he sounded like he was cursing under his breath. Pamela heard swift footfalls cross the lower level and patter up the stairs towards the exit. She kept her eyes closed, deciding that ten minutes would be a long enough pause before getting up to convince the students that they hadn't been overheard.

She fell asleep again well before that point: as Tamara had noted, she'd been up until the wee hours watching Allen from across the upper level, and trying to turn her mind to other things, and not succeeding very well at all.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song referred to in this chapter is "Hymne A L'amour", as performed by Edith Piaf.

Pamela slept. And as she slept, she dreamed.

_Allen stood at the end of a long dark hallway, his face to the far wall, and she had to fight through the dreadful weight of cold shadows to reach his side. When she did he did not turn to face her: he was staring straight ahead, into a tall mirror with an ornately gilded frame set with icy emeralds and shards of what looked like crystallized blood. It was an object both tasteless and strangely compelling, and the face that gazed back at him from its depths, unblinking, was not his own._

_Loathing and horror seized Pamela's heart and compressed it beyond endurance. She reached out her hand, found a fireplace poker leaning against the wall, and attacked the mirror with a breathless cry of desperate fury. It shattered like rotten ice at the touch of iron and tumbled in shards at their feet, the emeralds going dull and dark, the blood flowing freely — but from the broken pieces she could hear cold cheerless laughter, and she knew that the demonic presence that possessed it had not been completely killed._

_"Daimonic," the voice from the broken mirror purred, mockingly familiar. "The word you're looking for is_ **_daimonic._ ** _"_

She awoke with a thrill of ice in her veins, to discover the workshop deserted, sunlight streaming in through the tall windows, the murmur of four voices deep in conversation coming from behind the closed doors leading out to the waiting area, and food upon the table awaiting her attention.

***********************************************

She breakfasted heartily on scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browned potatoes and cold toast, washing it all down with a cup of strong coffee. The team had not finished their conference by the time she was done (oh, the low murmur of Allen's rich baritone touched her so deeply even now!), and she took the opportunity to investigate a source of curiosity: Allen's personal desk, set against the eastern wall on the upper level.

She did not open any of the drawers, of course, but she was intensely interested in the numerous objects arranged on its surface. It was clearly the space of a creative individual — paper, calculators, books, writing implements, a pair of old-fashioned glasses and even a few small sculptures attested to that — but the focal point of its composition was obviously the row of pictures set along its outer edge. Although she had seen the desk on her previous visit to Allen's workshop she had not seen the images from this side before, and was intrigued to note that they were all variations on a theme: the family that Allen had possessed ten or so years ago, before his son David had been killed. There he stood with his former wife Caroline, in a posed portrait… there he stood holding his seven-year-old son in his arms… there, he bent over the boy to lay his cheek affectionately atop the small blond head… there, he proudly posed with his hands on the broadly grinning boy's shoulders after a soccer game. And on the far left side of the arrangement, almost at the end, a large portrait simply of the child himself, sweetly smiling, with a silver plaque that declared: IN MEMORY OF DAVID.

It was all heartbreaking, and surveying it made her feel vaguely guilty, as if she were intruding too intimately into the life of the man she loved but who had chosen a device over her — and indeed, she probably was. She turned to go, but paused when a photograph on the right-hand end of the row caught her eye. This one had a similar theme to many of the others: a male figure holding a child, arms wrapped protectively around him, but in this image the lighting was garish and dramatic, the two figures posed against a textured metal disc ringed with a halo of glaring lights. A chain bound them to the device, and Joe was gazing down at David 2 in a pose eerily reminiscent of a classic Madonna and Child. The image quality suggested that it had been taken from a video and something about it — the uncanny valley of similarity to human emotion, perhaps, in Joe's serene expression and David 2's wide anxious eyes — sent a subtle chill racing over Pamela's entire body.

At the base of this image stood a small white ceramic bowl, unadorned, and in that bowl was a single object: a shining black ring made of metal or of polished stone, sized to fit on a male finger. She looked at it closely but could discern no mark, and she was reluctant to touch it, for that would be trespassing even beyond the limits of her natural inquisitiveness. A glance toward the closed doors and a consideration of the level of conversation beyond it assured her that the team was still deep in conference, but she left the desk anyway; the feeling of trespass had only grown stronger while she considered the ring and whatever story it symbolized.

The thought of a fresh cup of coffee was appealing, so she fixed one for herself and turned her feet back towards the shelves of books, idly thinking of finding something new to read. Instead she found herself descending the stairs to the lower level. Joe was waiting for her there, and she drew close enough to study it as she had studied the black ring — and found it just as indecipherable. 

How curious… She had never paid any significant attention to mecha in her life, since they were, after all, appliances like blenders or recorders or cars. They were physical placeholders without stories attached, and Pamela was a woman who was driven to uncover hidden stories above all else. Creatures that possessed no significant inner or outer narrative were of no interest to her whatsoever. 

She sipped her coffee and contemplated Joe's mask, as serene now as in the image from the Flesh Fair, and tried to ignore the inner whisper that suggested that the curves of its lips and the angles of its cheekbones and the arches of its carefully crafted eyebrows were hieroglyphs in a language she did not yet comprehend:  enigmatic, previously unknown, but potent with the weight of a thousand unspoken words.

 _The word you're looking for is daimonic,_ it whispered in the back of her mind, _from the Greek_ daimon _, a guiding spirit, a man's genius and his inspiration._

***********************************************

By the time the team emerged again, with Allen at their head, she was back in her armchair with her legs tucked under her, half-immersed in the second chapter of _The Silmarillion_. At once she looked up, her eyes seeking Allen's tall form, and what she saw sent a wave of relief rushing through her: he was clean-shaven and neatly dressed, his lab coat fresh and crisp, his hair smoothly combed. But more importantly, although he was still clearly labouring under a weight of weariness, the aura of lethal and desperate exhaustion had diminished significantly. 

The students headed at once for their work stations, and so did Allen — but his gaze slid sidelong to Pamela's position first. The most glancing touch of his eyes, but it thrilled her as if she were sixteen years old and had never been kissed: it was a cold glance, evaluating her… but was there a trace of warmth within it? Had Tamara been correct in her assessment of the situation between them?

The thrill became a leap of her heart when he granted her the smallest nod before proceeding to his station and seating himself again, issuing a command: "Computer, restart work flow."

Pamela set aside the book and rose to her feet to get him a cup of fresh coffee.

***********************************************

Mid-morning, and Allen, who had been murmuring for hours in the programming language that Pamela could not interpret and exchanging curt phrases with his students in a similar vein, finally spoke words that she could easily understand: "Computer, begin playlist Joe One."

There was a brief pause, the faint carrier wave of an audio system going live — and then music flowed into the workspace, soft and yearning and underlaid with the nostalgic hiss of a very old recording:

_Le ciel bleu sur nous peut s'effondrer_  
 _Et la terre peut bien s'écrouler_  
 _Peu m'importe si tu m'aimes_  
 _Je me fous du monde entier_  
 _Tant qu'l'amour inond'ra mes matins_  
 _Tant que mon corps frémira sous tes mains_  
 _Peu m'importent les problèmes_  
 _Mon amour puisque tu m'aimes…_

Allen was leaning forward, his gaze fixed on one of his screens in particular with singular focus, and Brian was softly chanting: "Primary perception filter at seventeen percent… twenty-three percent… thirty-nine percent…"

Even over the wailing of the singer, Pamela could hear Allen's voice, a fervent whisper: "Come on, Joe… come back to us…"

"… fifty-six percent —"

"Hold it there," Allen commanded, and Brian touched his interface in a particular pattern. The music crooned on. For a long moment Allen continued to stare at his own readouts; then his gaze rose to take in all his students, and his face suddenly lit up with a smile of such joy and relief that Pamela's heart coiled into itself and hissed like a serpent.

Brian, slumping back into his seat in a posture of sudden relaxation after a pitched struggle, spoke for all: "He's still in there!"

Allen rose from his chair and came around to Joe's couch, to take the robot's right hand and smile down at its unmoving mask. Brian leaned forward to squint at his screen. "Sixty-three point two percent. He felt _that._ His sensuality subroutines are still viable."

Tamara nodded. "So. We are not too late."

For a moment Allen's smile lingered, radiant; then it abruptly faded, and he glanced round at his team with eyes haunted anew. "Not for his foundational processes, no. But that doesn't mean his higher functions are intact." He laid his other hand atop Joe's, pressing it warmly, then reluctantly released it and headed back to his own station. "How are the track remnant sweeps coming along?"

The grad students started to issue reports in tech jargon, leaving Pamela with nothing to concentrate upon but the music, which she was, unfortunately, well enough versed in French to get the gist of:

_If one day life tears you away from me, if you die then you will be far from me_  
 _What's it matter if you love me, because I will die too._  
 _We will have for us, eternity, in the blue of all the immensity_  
 _In heaven, no more problems... my love, do you believe that we love each other?…_  
 _God, reunite those who love each other _…__


	10. Chapter 10

The day progressed, and with it the flow of music. Pamela tried to lose herself in the poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien in between supplying Allen with fresh coffee and, when mid-day came, bringing him a plate of dinner at his desk after Brian wheeled the meals in on a rolling cart — why he had been able to procure one and April had not was a mystery that Pamela didn't get a chance to solve, because the students took dinner at their work stations as well, so immersed in hunting and killing the white code that they were reluctant to pause even for food. Pamela brought a plate to April as well, accepted her distracted smile and thanks with a nod, and returned to her surveillance perch overhead.

The phrase "tried to lose herself" was operative because of the music: low, never obtrusive, but constant and presumably being played for Joe's benefit. She found herself staring at the printed page without seeing it, her attention occupied by a different type of word-flow. She counted forty-three pieces, a few of which were instrumental (including classics such as Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"), but most of which were sung — and the lyrics and musical styles covered a wide range, with some telling similarities. Many were lyrical in nature; all concerned love in one aspect or another, from tender sentimentality to sexual obsession; and above all, none but the instrumental pieces were examples that she would have connected to Allen's sensibilities in a million years.

Furthermore, most of them were practically ancient: a century old at least, sometimes closer to two. Pamela's knowledge of the further reaches of modern music was sketchy — she had never particularly cared to study it, finding the interest many people had in popular artists to be rather trivial — but this music intrigued her, because Allen had chosen it. Why? To appeal to a lover-robot's limited understanding, mindlessly fixated upon the surface details of romantic interaction? Then why choose songs that spoke of that interaction in anything but the most glowing terms? Many of the compositions took that approach, certainly, ranging from the tender to the blatantly passionate, but others painted the act of wooing in the far less complimentary light:

_Vows are spoken to be broken_  
 _Feelings are intense, words are trivial_  
 _Pleasures remain, so does the pain —_  
 _Words are meaningless, and forgettable…_

Some of them were downright cynical:

_Moonlight and love songs, never out of date_  
 _Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate_  
 _Women meets man, and man must have his mate,_  
 _That no one can deny…_

A few of them seemed to address love in only the most oblique terms:

_What if I'm a crowded desert_  
 _Too much pain with little pleasure_  
 _What if I'm the nicest place you'll never want to go_  
 _What if I don't know who I am_  
 _Will that keep us both from trying_  
 _To find out and when you have_  
 _Be sure to let me know…_

And she noted another pattern, intermittent but repeated: the theme of sacrifice in the name of the beloved one. Curious — and troubling, but she could scarcely ask Allen about it right now.

***********************************************

_He did not come at the dawning, he did not come at noon,_  
 _But out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,_  
 _When the road was a gypsy's ribbon looping the purple moor_  
 _A redcoat troop came marching, marching, marching,_  
 _A redcoat troop came marching up to the old inn door…_

It was late afternoon, and the pale sunlight of the morning had become the warm yellow rays of an approaching autumn evening, when someone rapped softly on the closed doors of frosted glass leading to the waiting area.

Tamara and Brian both looked up, then looked at each other; April's station was currently deserted, for Tamara had recently convinced her to slip away and snatch a few hours of sleep. For his part, Allen paid the attempted interruption no attention whatsoever. 

Another tapping of knuckles, this one more imperative. 

Tamara looked to Allen. "Professor…?"

"See who it is," Allen ordered with a trace of exasperation through his preoccupation, "and send them away."

The blonde nodded. "Of course." 

Pamela kept her eyes on _The Silmarillion_ , though she'd been following its narrative in only the most perfunctory way, and tried to make herself invisible. It was a skill she'd perfected during her long career as a reporter, and with the streaming sunlight illuminating the wall across from her in a blaze of color and casting her own position into shadow she suspected that whoever entered the workshop would not notice her at all, at least initially. 

Tamara opened the doors only a few inches and spoke sharply to whoever lay beyond them — "I'm very sorry, but Professor Hobby —" — only to have the signal completely ignored: the doors were pushed open from the other side and a small figure slipped right by her, to stand looking keenly around the forbidden space. He was even paler than Tamara herself, with a shock of auburn hair styled in the fine rumpled spikes that the younger adult generation currently favoured, and when his gaze found Allen he cried out with hail-fellow-well-met heartiness:

"Professor Hobby!"

Tamara's expression suggested that she was inclined to grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him out bodily, but she clenched her fists and looked to Allen for instructions instead. Allen finally glanced up, the lines of his face becoming a steel engraving. "Frank Albona," he said in a tone that would have send Pamela running, personally. "Did you not receive my memo? I left strict instructions that nobody is to disturb —"

Albona spoke over him in a rush: "Listen, I wouldn't normally intrude on your work — you know that — but the Board… well, they've sent me to see how you're proceeding."

Allen's icy eyes narrowed even further. "The work is going well," he replied inscrutably. 

"Ah." The younger man's eyes flickered to the muddy and inert form of Joe. "That's excellent, really excellent. Because the quarterly Allocation Committee meeting is coming up tomorrow morning, and your RSVP must have gotten lost, because —"

"I won't be attending."

An awkward pause — on Albona's part, at any rate. Allen's stony demeanour was unshakeable. "Ah. I see. May I ask why?"

For a long moment Allen simply studied him, as if debating whether or not to bother answering a question posed by an insect. "The Board has my proposal for funding for the Orison project. Have one of the junior partners present it. Personally I'd recommend Judy Harper, since she's well versed in —"

"Well, it's… a bit more complicated than that." A small cough this time, his closed fist briefly rising to cover his mouth. Allen continued to regard him with glacial courtesy. "Nobody's seen you in over a week, and frankly we're starting to get a little worried."

"I appreciate your concern." Pamela didn't believe that for a fraction of a second. "But you can assure the Board that I'm perfectly fine — simply deeply engaged in my current project."

"A project that the Board did not approve," Frank pointed out almost apologetically. Pamela didn't believe him either.

Allen shrugged. "Tell them that they can take it out of my vacation time for this calendar year, then. God only knows that I have enough of it banked up to —"

Albona wasn't looking at him anymore. He was looking back over his shoulder and gesturing to someone in the outer office, motioning them forward with a furtive jerk of his left hand. And someone did indeed slip into the room to stand on the other side of him from Tamara —

— or rather, _something_. More specifically, a Simulate City LX9-277E-HT, clad in a sleek black jumpsuit and scanning the room with hooded green eyes, seduction clearly engraved in every line of its tall slender body.

Pamela was surprised at the shock it gave her: like seeing a dead thing come back to life. She actually glanced at the examination chair to make sure that Joe was still in it. He was, and her gaze flew next to Allen, who was staring at the new arrival with wide eyes full of shock. But the stricken look lasted only for a brief span of seconds, replaced by something entirely different — and, to Pamela, positively terrifying. 

He rose slowly from his seat and stalked toward the stairs, never taking his gaze from the LX9, which regarded him from beneath tinted eyelids in an unmistakeable attempt to be alluring. The sight of Allen chilled Pamela to the bone; she could see a similar reaction writ large in Tamara's face, and at the edge of her hearing Brian muttered a small but fervent curse: "Oh, _hell…_ " Allen's body language was still tightly controlled, superficially calm even, but that was an illusion: he embodied the most complete definition of "towering rage" Pamela had ever seen, and she was amazed that Frank Albona didn't turn tail and flee as fast as his legs could carry him as the older man advanced up the stairs.

Instead the foolish boy was actually smiling faintly, as if he'd scored a point against his opponent. He watched with that smirk firmly in place as Allen came to a halt just past the top of the stairs, his unblinking gaze still on the mecha ten or so feet away. It raised its sculpted chin slightly and gave him a blatant come-hither look, and when Allen provided no response to that overture it employed its voice — another doppelganger, a perfect duplicate of the original: "Professor Hobby, I'm so _very_ pleased to —"

 _"What —"_ A low growl, leonine and savage; for a moment he actually seemed to lose the power of coherent speech. The mecha fell silent and Allen finally tore his gaze away from its performance to glare at Albona, whose smile was beginning to falter. "What… is the meaning of this?"

"The…" At last it seemed to be occurring to him that he had walked into a lion's den. "The Board wanted to save you some time, so they procured this unit to —"

"— to replace Joe?" The vibrato of his fury filled the room, although he was still speaking quietly. Pamela sincerely doubted that a man like Albona could also hear the grief and guilt that howled alongside it. "You were sent here to tempt me into abandoning him?"

"That robot's cube is fried," Albona hastened to point out, gesturing towards Joe's position; behind him, Tamara bared her teeth in a snarl and half-raised one fist. "Everybody agrees on that point. And we've managed to find you an identical unit — it's even part of the same production run, identical in every —" 

'How _dare_ you!" Now the roar was much closer to the surface. Albona, wide-eyed, shut up. In Pamela's opinion it was the smartest thing he'd done thus far. "This is neither your business, nor the Board's business, nor the concern of anybody whom I have not invited into this room. And frankly, I'm insulted that they sent you to to deliver this…" His glance flickered over Joe's duplicate like a whip-strike; Pamela half expected to see score marks appear on its smooth cheeks. "… this _toy_ , as a bribe for my cooperation."

Frank's tone grew wheedling. "Now, Professor Hobby, surely you can —"

"No. I cannot. And you can tell Lily that —" He checked himself, and the rage in his eyes sharpened and grew even colder. "No, I'll tell her myself. Just — get this _thing_ out of my workshop, and if you value your job I never want to see it again."

Under that gimlet gaze Albona's poise finally collapsed. He made a valiant attempt to salvage it, though. "I assure you, the Board only has your best interests at —"

 _"Now."_ Allen's voice was soft, the way the footfalls of an approaching tiger are soft. "Before I change my mind and have you demoted to cleaning oil rig mecha in the Gulf."

Albona finally took to his heels, although he confined the speed of his retreat to a stiff-legged walk. The LX9-277E-HT followed him without a backward glance, and Tamara immediately closed the doors behind them before turning toward Allen, her usually confident gaze strangely gentle. "Professor…?"

He did not reply at once, simply stood where he was, staring at the closed doors while his breath came quickly and deeply. Overhead a woman sang with sweet power:

_And back he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky_  
 _With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high_  
 _Blood red were the spurs in the golden noon, wine red was his velvet coat_  
 _When they shot him down in the highway, down like a dog on the highway_  
 _And he lay in his blood in the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat…_

At last his breathing slowed, and his gaze finally shifted to Tamara's compassionate face. "Continue the track remnant annihilation," he said in a low hoarse voice. "I'll be back… momentarily."

She nodded. "We will, Professor."

He took his leave with square-shouldered ferocity barely contained, and Pamela would have given anything to have been a fly on the wall for his upcoming conversation with Lily Shueng: there was no denying that when he was angry, Allen Hobby was one of the sexiest men on the face of the planet. But in the absence of that opportunity she could certainly make do with what she had at hand.

It was time to talk to Brian Cooper.


	11. Chapter 11

_On either side the river lie long fields of barley and of rye_  
 _That clothe the wold and meet the sky, and through the field the road run by_  
 _To many-towered Camelot,_  
 _And up and down the people go, gazing where the lilies blow_  
 _Round an island there below, the Island of Shalott…_

Pamela initiated contact by the most expedient method, using the common currency of the workshop: she brought Brian a fresh cup of coffee after also making one for herself, and when he'd taken it from her with a curt nod and accepted the overture by having a sip from it, she took the opportunity to linger, glancing towards the shadowed ceiling. "I must say that I'm a little surprised."

He had turned back to his work flow, and his tone was preoccupied. "About…?"

She took the question as an encouraging sign that his attitude towards her was indeed thawing, and pressed on. "The Professor's choice in music. This really doesn't seem at all typical of his tastes."

"That's because it isn't." He took another quick sip of coffee. "It's Joe's."

_Only reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley_  
 _Hear a song that echoes cheerly, from the river winding clearly_  
 _Down to towered Camelot,_  
 _And by the moon the reaper weary, piling sheaves in uplands airy,_  
 _Listening, whispers: "'Tis the faerie, the Lady of Shalott…"_

For a span of seconds Pamela was stricken speechless, her mind rapidly tracking back over everything she'd heard thus far today. At last she protested: "Mecha don't have —"

"Musical preferences?" He glanced sidelong at her, then put down the cup and turned toward her. "Computer, pause work flow… Well, Joe has an hedonic profile the likes of which I've never seen before. The Professor has been collecting examples of it for the past year or so, and this playlist is the one of the results."

"It listens to _music?_ "

"And dances to it, apparently — but that's arguably an adaptation of pre-programmed behaviour." He leaned back in his chair and gave his spine a slow sinuous twist, grimacing as muscles presumably started to unlock along its length. "Urgh… oh yeah, Joe is chock-full of surprising quirks. The Professor would probably want to retain him based on that fact alone. He's a curiosity, all right."

Pamela's memory, which had continued to rewind, highlighted a particular point in an earlier conversation with this man. "Quirks? Perhaps I could believe that. But you used the word 'happy' to describe him at one point— when surely that can't be employed in accurate reference to anything a mecha could experience? Emotions, in the human sense, were never part of their design."

"Not until David 2," Brian corrected her with a sardonic twist of his mouth, "which was an unmitigated disaster." 

"Granted." She smiled at him thinly, amused in spite of herself by what an impertinent child he could be. "But that's not the point we're discussing."

"True enough." That little smirk was back, but it rapidly faded to a somber expression. "I'll be attaining my graduate degree in Cognitive Engineering in less than a year, and you're right: normally I wouldn't touch any word pertaining to affect with a ten-mile pole. But in this case I used it very deliberately. April and I have been observing the Professor and Joe for nearly ten months now, and yes, the LX9-277E series were programmed with a highly advanced degree of affect simulation — and that's what we wrote the smiles and the body language off as, at first." 

He fell silent for a long moment, gazing at the largest screen, where green symbols were interwoven with poisonous thorns of white. "But the Professor knows more about mecha engineering in a global sense than just about anybody else on the planet. He's fully aware of how lover-robots are designed, and that affect simulation is part of the package. And yet _he_ treated his interactions with Joe as if there was something more there than an illusion, and I think far too highly of him to believe that he was deluding himself." He met Pamela's eyes again squarely. "With his comprehensive knowledge, he judged Joe to actually be expressing something that, while it might not have a one-to-one equivalency with organic emotional paradigms, still had some base equivalency. Hence my statement that they made each other happy. Are you in a position to prove me wrong?"

Pamela inclined her chin at him graciously, conceding the eloquence of his argument, but she was aware that her gaze had turned steely. "You'll pardon me if I'm still not convinced."

A quiet snort. "I didn't expect you to be." He leaned forward in his seat, resting one elbow on the edge of the table and clenching his fist in front of him, to fix her with an unblinking gaze. "But how about this: we downloaded and reviewed the cube activity logs of the last hours of Joe's functioning, and April predicted that we'd find a random selection of accessed memories from all periods of Joe's nine-year existence — no rhyme, no reason, and certainly no coherent theme. And do you know what we found instead?"

"I can't begin to imagine."

_She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room,_  
 _She saw the water lily bloom, she saw the helmet and the plume,_  
 _She looked down to Camelot._  
 _Out flew the web and floated wide; the mirror crack'd from side to side._  
 _"The curse has come upon me!" cried the Lady of Shalott…_

"Professor Hobby, interspaced with memories of David 2, at a ratio of four to one. And not just the sexual interactions either, although those were certainly present. Joe placed enough significance on working with the Professor, and travelling with him, and dancing with him and talking with him and sitting with him — hell, on just _being_ with him — that those memories carried a cognitive resonance strong enough to override data attached to his primary design function as a general-access sensuality simulator. He spent the last eleven hours of his existence remembering the last two years spent with one particular human being — and the last coherent image we could pull from the record was of the Professor's face." A pause, then a mocking inflection: "You were in there too, but not really enough to mention."

A chill had settled in the base of Pamela's spine as soon as he mentioned the ratio; now it had crept all the way up to her nape and was raising the hairs on the back of her neck. "That's…"

"Unexpected? Inexplicable? Downright revolutionary?" His eyes had taken on a predatory gleam, like those of a wolf closing in for the kill. "And then there was the note — ah, the note! A note that nobody taught him how to write, expressing concepts and revealing a volitional capacity that not even the Professor expected from him. I'll be the first to admit it: I've been top of my class throughout my university career, and I can't make heads nor tails out of what's going on here. And neither can April, who's been top of _her_ classes in Behavioural Design for just as long." He sat back again, releasing Pamela from the intensity of his stare and opening his clenched fist, slowly stretching the long olive fingers. "I can tell you this, though: if Joe comes out of this in one piece, I'll be paying a lot more attention to him in the future — and if he doesn't, it's all going to make for a fascinating cube dissection."

_Heard a carol, mournful, holy, chanted loudly, chanted lowly,_  
 _Till her blood was frozen slowly and her eyes were darkened wholly,_  
 _Turned to towered Camelot._  
 _For ere she reached upon the tide the first house by the water-side,_  
 _Singing in her song she died, the Lady of Shalott..._

She found her breath coming deeper and faster, and struggled to bring it back under control. "But he's not likely to come out of it… is he?"

"If desire alone could affect the outcome of this kind of experiment, I'd guarantee that Joe will be just fine." He studied her and seemed to see the distress she was trying to hide, and to sympathize for once, for this smile faded too. "But this is science, and we're dealing with so many unpredictable variables that I can't even begin to calculate the odds."

For a long moment silence lay between them, full of further unspoken struggle on Pamela's part as she fought the new — and heretical — conclusions that attacked her on every front. Brian simply watched her, and waited.

_Who is this? And what is here? And in the lighted palace near_  
 _Died the sound of royal cheer; they crossed themselves, for fear,_  
 _The knights at Camelot._  
 _Lancelot mused a little space; he said "She has a lovely face;_  
 _"God in His mercy lend her grace, the Lady of Shalott."_

At last she raised her eyes again, toward the music that had suddenly taken on an entirely new depth and dimension. "Allen wonders where it got the idea to run away," she whispered through the painful mix of emotions that had risen to tighten her throat. She simply couldn't believe… "Has he even listened to this music? It wasn't an original thought at all. It was merely imitation."

Brian shook his head. "It was an abstraction," he corrected her almost gently. "Remember, nobody ordered him to run away. Did these sorts of narratives inspire him? I would have said such a thing was impossible even a week ago… but now, I'm not so sure. And if that's the case, if Joe took a song about love and turned it into practical action, then he's done something that no machine on record has ever done before — except for David 2." His gaze shifted past her, to settle on the mecha whose mind might well be forever lost. "And you know what? Maybe that's enough reason for the Professor to risk his career here at Cybertronics. You don't just throw something like that away with the rest of the garbage."

Pamela half-nodded before she could stop herself, her eyes following his. She didn't want to nod. She wanted to throw her cup of hot coffee into his face, to scream at him, to roundly abuse him as a liar and as possibly even more deluded than the man she loved, going to spiritual war on behalf of a creature that existed only in the physical dimension.

The background track changed again, bringing with it a new quality of misery:

_I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord,_  
 _But you don't really care for music, do you?_  
 _It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift,_  
 _The baffled King composing "Hallelujah"…_

She left Brian to his work, and this time when she stared at the book in her lap she didn't see it at all. Every word and every note she heard now excoriated her mind and her heart, slipping inside her as relentlessly as the silver blades of autumn rain, teaching her a language she desperately did not want to learn how to comprehend.


	12. Chapter 12

It was impossible not to listen. And once listening, it was equally impossible not to hear.

_Dear my love, haven't you wanted to be with me, and_  
 _Dear my love, haven't you longed to be free?_  
 _I can't keep pretending that I don't even know you, when_  
 _At sweet night your are my own… Take my hand…_

She had researched and written thirteen articles on mecha science over the years, and the unexpressed assumption of all the experts she'd spoken to — unremarked upon because it was so obvious — was that mecha were highly sophisticated dolls, toys granted a simulacrum of life by clever tricks of programming and of neuronal sequencing technology. Complicated? Yes. Cunningly made? Certainly. Useful? Undeniably. But nonetheless merely toys, with no trace of anything spiritual in their natures. This was why nobody raised an eyebrow at the practice of Flesh Fairs, when surely if mecha possessed the slightest trace of soul, the slightest glimmer of true awareness, it would be perceived by decent people all over the world and an outcry would rise up to shake the foundations of the heavens. 

_Come away little lamb, come away to the water,_  
 _Give yourself so we might live anew;_  
 _Come away little lamb, come away to the slaughter,_  
 _To the ones appointed to appointed to see this through —_  
 _We are coming for you…_

But all across the planet, there was only silence. Oh, there were articles written by the sentimental and the deluded insisting that mecha were so much more than wires and gears and subroutines, but no scientist had ever taken them seriously — and who better than scientists to make a reasoned determination on the subject?

Until Allen Hobby, that is. Until he had declared that mecha could be rendered capable of imagination, of desire, of love — and until he had set out to make that dream real.

_There used to be a greying tower alone on the sea_  
 _You became the light on the dark side of me_  
 _Love remains a drug that's the high and not the pill_  
 _But did you know that when it snows my eyes become large and_  
 _The light that you shine can be seen…_

Clearly it was observational bias on his part that was leading him to his present conclusions. What else could one expect from the author of _How Can a Robot Become Human?_ What else, but that he would take a trick of behaviour in an already unstable mecha and spin it out into a tale of genuine devotion?

_How shall I hold my soul that it may not be touching yours?_  
 _How shall I lift it then above you, to where other things are waiting?_  
 _Ah! Gladly would I lodge it, all forgot, with some lost thing the dark is isolating,_  
 _On some remote and silent spot that, when your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating…_

But… the note. The obsessive memories. Two experts had rendered their opinions on the subject — three, if she counted Allen himself. But Allen was clearly thinking with his dick, and Brian and Tamara and April were so blinded by hero worship that they'd follow him to the ends of the earth no matter how deep his insanity.

_I have seen the compass turning, round and round my heart the senses are yearning_  
 _For a possible change of heart that's coming to you, coming to you —_  
 _You stand upright, you are different, why the spinal shock, the fusion, the evil?_  
 _Spill it out on the floor of belief: Come and mend this design, come and mend this design_  
 _With every right we do…_

Yet he'd rejected the duplicate. An identical sexual experience had been placed in front of him and he'd cast it away with loathing and contempt. What else could that suggest, but that the sexual element wasn't all there was to this?

_You are here, and so am I,_  
 _Maybe millions of people go by,_  
 _But they all disappear from view,_  
 _And I only have eyes for you…_

Lover-robots were designed to attract their human targets: thousands of man- and woman-hours had been been invested in the creation of each model, devoted to making them better at what they did than was ever organically possible. It wasn't terribly surprising that even a man like Allen Hobby had fallen prey to one — perhaps it was even to be expected, since he was so attuned to the mecha world, and so fascinated with the concept of a robot who could love.

It all came down to self-delusion. Even the wisest of men was not immune to that fatal flaw.

_Baby, I see — you're vulnerable to me,_  
 _That's your power over me…_  
 _Baby, baby I know, it's always been so:_  
 _Physical love is oh so meaningful for you…_  
 _You write love letters to me — strong…_  
 _You know how to talk to me — so strong…_

***********************************************

The note remained.

_Dearest Allen… I can't bear to see you suffer… Please don't look for me… Forget that I ever belonged to you, and be happy — that’s all I could ever wish for…_

She turned it over and over in her mind, looking at it from all angles. She fought to reduce it to a conclusion in keeping with a lifetime of acquired and innate knowledge.

It remained resolutely undigestible.

***********************************************

_Chosen — out of all the madding crowd,_  
 _Frozen — 'til you laid your hand in mine,_  
 _Broken — then you spoke my name aloud,_  
 _Fallen — 'til you smashed the chains of time…_

The thing must have some kind of code string for making such selections as whether to choose one piece of music over another: a pre-programmed subroutine, no more remarkable than an embroidery machine's ability to stitch the outline of a flower.

But surely Allen and his students, specialists all, would have known that? Surely they would have accounted for —

_I want to reconcile the violence in your heart,_  
 _I want to recognize your beauty's not just a mask,_  
 _I want to exorcize the demons from your past,_  
 _I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart…_

Yet they treated it as something remarkable, that these songs should have been chosen by a robot.

Willingly chosen? And how carefully Allen had been watching, to see it happening! What further care had gone into this compilation of music that…

_Quand il me prend dans ses bras,_  
 _Il me parle tout bas_  
 _Je vois la vie en rose…_  
 _Il me dit des mots d'amour_  
 _Des mots de tous les jours_  
 _Et ca me fait quelque chose…_

… that had pleased his companion. That had made it smile. That had led it to dance for his pleasure — and just possibly, heretically, for its own.

_Heaven, I'm in heaven,_  
 _And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak,_  
 _And I seem to find the happiness I seek_  
 _When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek…_

***********************************************

And there was the music itself — the damnable, soft, inexorable music, winding its way into her brain and coiling around her heart like a silken serpent. It had woken Joe up too, stirring some kind of dim recognition in his paralyzed cube. Resonance. Connection.

She had always possessed an unfailing inner drive to uncover the truth, and thus she couldn't stop the end sum of this dilemma from manifesting in her mind: What sort of being would appreciate this particular mix of lyrics and melody? What conclusions could be drawn from what she was hearing?

A creature alert to the theme of Love in all its forms, not merely the cliches of the romantic, and not merely the appetites of lust. A mind that grasped (or at least grasped after) the multi-faceted nature of that most complex of human emotions. A sensibility that encompassed both the maudlin and the passionate, the tender and the cynical. An existence that had included both bitterness and sweetness, and yes, that had abstracted those experiences into something beyond the cold bare data of memory traces inscribed in a neuronal database. 

A lifetime of experience with mecha told her that this was all impossible. She rejected it again and again… and again… and again…

_A reckoning is coming for this land, this troubled fractured world;_  
 _A time to stake the truth, a time to stand, and war-banners unfurled;_  
 _Yet though the sun burns black I'll fear no fall, through shattered nights and days,_  
 _For Love is strong as death, harsh as the grave — a fierce and sacred blaze…_

Allen had still not returned when, aching and weary in every dimension, she closed her book and arranged herself on her unlikely bed and opened her arms to sleep, willing it to wash her clean of sorrow and confusion and pain.

And it did. For a little while.


	13. Chapter 13

_A rabbit ran beneath the moon, fleeing from the shadowed edge of the woodland across a field of grain cut short in the final harvest. It was a common little thing, brown-spotted, but the moonlight had turned its coat a gleaming dove-grey and was reflected brightly in its dark unblinking eyes._

_As she watched it streak over the frosty ground a flow of words from a long-ago book half-remembered arose from the depths of her soul and filled her with the uneasy chill of prescience:_ **_All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you: digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning… be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed…_ **

_She followed its track — sometimes alongside, sometimes above — and in the distance she could hear the deep belling cry of pursuing hounds. A ditch lay ahead: if it could reach that haven, it would be safe, and she found herself silently urging it to run even faster. But it was already going all out, and an excited babble of human voices rang out from the edge of the wood while it was still yards from safety._

_It had almost reached its goal when a shot cracked across the fields. The rabbit leaped high into the air and then tumbled head-over-heels into the ditch, trailing a spray of wet droplets behind it like the brief flare of a gleaming ebony coat tail._

_For a long dreadful moment she hung suspended; even the moon seemed to hold its breath. She did not want to follow its path; she did not want to see it lying there in the mud, flattened and empty in death. But when she looked over the edge she saw only a drift of leaves spotted with more blood, black in the moonlight, making a trail that led down the ditch a little way and into the mouth of a dry ceramic culvert where the wounded creature had dragged itself._

_She descended into the ditch and approached the culvert to crouch before it, peering into the deeper blackness that seemed to beckon her._

_"I —" But that was not the right tone to take. She cleared her throat and tried again: "Prince of a Thousand Enemies?"_

_"Come to us," a familiar and well-hated voice whispered, "if you dare." In obedience to its invitation the culvert arched high overhead to permit her entrance. A chill deeper than frost crept up her spine, but she could already dimly see what awaited her and the sight drew her forward as inexorably as gravity draws the moon to the Earth it bathes with silver light._

_Cold breathed over her like the essence of desolation. Allen lay alone in a vast chamber of rough-hewn ice. He was arranged as if for burial with his hands folded on his breast, eyes serenely closed, clad in the dress suit he had worn during their first joyous meeting in Minneapolis, on a marble bier whose sides were clad in creeping thorn-decked roses as white as snow and as red as blood. She instinctively knew that one touch of those thorns meant disaster and that premonition alone made her hesitate to approach him._

**_But True Love's first kiss,_ ** _her heart sang out confidently,_ **_is the only sovereign remedy for the Sleep of Death!_ ** _So she started forward again, only to be stopped by the sight of an heraldic device engraved on the front of the bier, barely visible through the profusion of roses: a running rabbit made of silver, with eyes of cool obsidian that seemed to hold the moon in their depths. She was still staring at it when the voice that had drawn her here spoke softly from the shadows: "For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come must give us pause…"_

 _The sound made her look up again to find Joe suddenly standing behind the bier, a shocking apparition in the formal clothing Allen had prepared for him, gazing down at his master with his head cocked to one side in that idiotic mannerism of his. At the same time there was a sad and terrible calm about him, reminiscent of the attitude of the Virgin Mary in Michaelangelo's_ _Pietà, and she found herself as intrigued as she was frightened and angry._

_"Shouldn't you be trapped in a mirror?" she asked him sharply._

_For a moment she thought that he hadn't heard her. She opened her mouth to speak again, but he raised his eyes to hers and stopped her in her tracks. The moon shone in their jade depths even in this cold dark place._

_"I **am** a mirror," Joe replied simply, then turned his gaze to Allen again, laying a hand on his shoulder. Green tendrils curled around his wrist and twined up the arm of his dove-grey suit, budding and blooming with tiny perfect flowers. "He shall die, one day."_

_"Yes," she agreed, her voice quivering with the resentful beating of her heart. "He will."_

_"All flesh is born to fade and to perish," Joe mused, his gaze continuing to parse Allen's face. "In the end, only we will survive." He looked up again and something else, something even more Other than mecha intelligence, lurked behind his green eyes. "Only the mecha will endure."_

**_Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed…_ **

_"Then what do you want with him?" she demanded, daring to step close enough to the bier that the perfume of its undying flowers shivered around her._

_Joe smiled, an expression with far too many sharp teeth for her comfort. "All things proceed in cycles, gracious Lady, and all things exist in relation to their opposite. It is only through their union that the pain of existence is ameliorated." Another downward glance. "For a short span of years, at any rate."_

_Fear awakened within her like a flare of bitter petals and she reached out desperately, heedless of the thorns and their poison, but through a trick of the queer spacial mechanics of dreams she could not quite touch her beloved. "Leave him alone. Please. Finish your journey and go. I'll do anything…"_

_"Anything?" He smiled again, almost merrily. "Will you run until your heart bursts? Will you endure three days on a hook in the Kingdom of Ereshkigal? Will you mourn with a love that never dies? Will you carry his memory into eternity when all else has passed away?"_

_"I'll **really** love him," she hissed, "with a mortal heart and a mortal soul, and I'll die with him at the end. What more can you offer him? What depth does a mirror have in comparison to the true living image of God?"_

_"Are you jealous because I prophesied for him with this mouth?" he mocked her. "Or that he hungers for my kisses because these lips have dripped truth like honey and poison?"_

_She could feel the skin on the back of her neck actually crawling, but love gave her the courage to demand: "What_ **_are_ ** _you?"_

_His green eyes held hers, shining like lunar fire, like ice, like venom, like emeralds. For a timeless moment he regarded her evenly before offering a single enigmatic statement: "I am."_

_The softest whisper, as tender as the new leaves of spring: "I am."_

_Then a leonine roar as vast as the sea, surging forth to drown her and shattering the chamber's roof from side to side: **"I AM!"**_

She jolted awake in the shadows of the upper level of Allen's workshop with a racing heart, knowing that sleep was not destined to come again — not this night, when a crescent moon gazed at her through the centre window and traced the outlines of an elegant statue beyond, a tall slender figure that overlooked the dark waters forever with its cold and unwavering eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Prince with a Thousand Enemies" reference and the image of the wounded rabbit in the culvert are respectfully borrowed from "Watership Down" by Richard Adams, which Pamela has clearly read at some point in the past.


	14. Chapter 14

It was a measure of how worn out Pamela had become that she'd slept right through Allen's return to the workshop: the spot lighting was back on and the tall windows were pitch black save for a few reflected images of the interior and that pale sliver of moon riding high in the sky. She'd also missed Tamara's departure: Brian and April were now on duty, working at their stations with silent diligence beneath the constant flow of soft music. The master station was unmanned, and when she looked across the lower level of the shop she saw Allen lying supine on the couch under the plaid blanket, his left hand open on his chest and his right arm flung over his head on the pillow, his sleeping face still turned towards the mecha who might never rouse again.

Pamela envied him his physical comfort, since her own back and neck (and practically every other muscle in her body) were strongly protesting her time spent this armchair undergoing two highly unpleasant dreaming interludes. Yet Allen had neither invited her to use the couch nor told one of his students to inform her that she could take advantage of it when it was not in use. It was an act out of place with the civility she'd always seen him extend to everyone around him, even serving-mecha, but these were unusual circumstances: she suspected, for example, that Frank Albona would be doing his level best to avoid encountering Allen again for months to come, on the off chance that a trip to Florida was in his immediate future.

From her yearning distance she traced the lines of Allen's face with her gaze, noting the tiny crease of tension between his eyebrows that had never quite faded, and the way his right hand was clenched into a fist. _He still resents my presence. He hasn't thrown me out, but he's not making any concessions to my comfort either. And can I really blame him? I tried to kill the — whatever it is, he loves._ Remembering his infuriated reaction to Albona's offer of a lover-robot to fulfill his physical needs, she wryly reflected: _I'm lucky he didn't leave a standing order with Centre security to drag me up to the nearest parapet and throw me into the sea if I ever dared to show my face around here again._

Hard on the heels of that observation came a hopeful cry, almost overflowing her soaring heart: _Could it be true? Does he still care for me, in spite of everything that's happened? The human heart doesn't limit itself to embracing a single person at a time. Is it possible that he loves me still?_

The evidence suggested that he did: he hadn't completely barred her from his presence, after all. But even if he did, it was fundamentally irrelevant. The only chance she stood of getting back into Allen's arms lay in Joe's own termination, and if that came to pass she suspected — no, she _knew_ — that it would be a very long time before he'd consider putting his heart into anyone else's hands again. He was a tremendously resilient individual but also one capable of indelible devotion and lasting sorrow: witness the love that had inspired the David 2 project five years after the death of his son, and the depth of emotion she'd heard in his voice the first time he'd told her about the car crash that had stolen his child away. 

 _He's had so much grief in his life already._ She turned her gaze to the examination couch where Joe lay upon the bier of high technology, and an olfactory memory-trace of the mecha's scent — attar of roses, a faint perfume that had made her shudder with visceral revulsion the first time she'd perceived it on Allen's clothing — came over her, as if she were bending over a wreath laid at the entrance to a sepulchre. _If only I could convince him to —_

And from her soul a sudden prayer welled up, a whisper of heterodoxy in relation to all her past life that slipped into her heart as sleekly as an oiled blade: _Please, God, don't let him die! I hate him like poison, but Allen needs him — and even if I've been rejected, I can at least take some comfort in Allen's happiness with —_

Then her rational mind caught up with the emotional surge and reined it in savagely, reeling back in outraged horror: _No! How could I possibly consider wishing him a lifetime's obsession with — with that thing? He loves me, and he is_ ** _mine!_** _And when its cube fails I'll be right here, ready to help him pick up the pieces and to rebuild a new life — with a real love that isn't a dance with the ghost in a machine's artificial brain!_

The thought warmed her considerably, almost enough to banish the chill that her latest dream

_a rabbit ran beneath the moon_

had laid over her heart. She unfolded herself from the embrace of her armchair's leather cushions, wincing when a bright needle of pain shot down her spine from the nape of her neck, and went to have a hot shower and slip into a change of clothes. Dawn wouldn't be coming for hours yet, but in Allen's despair-driven realm the rhythms of the normal working world had ceased to have much meaning.

***********************************************

In one respect at least she could make herself useful in this enclave of experts, and as soon as she'd emerged from the walk-in closet clad in a tasteful coat dress of midnight blue she made coffee for Brian and April and took it down to them. They were both at April's station, she seated and he standing over her shoulder, discussing a frozen image on one of the screens in the tersely sculpted poetry of tech talk, but they both looked up as she approached — April with a sweet smile, Brian with a curt nod of recognition.

"Thanks, Ms. Cunningham!" April took the cup from her outstretched hand and took a long sip. Brian likewise accepted the offering, raised it in a sardonic little salute, and tasted it — then scowled.

"Too much sugar," he complained. Pamela ignored the dig in favour of sending a bucket down the well that was most likely to give her the information she craved. She cast a solicitous glance toward Allen before turning her full attention to April.

"Is he all right?" she asked. "After what happened earlier…"

The black-haired girl nodded and opened her mouth to speak, her brown eyes full of apprehension, but Brian interjected: "He's in one piece, but the project is on the chopping block."

April looked up him resentfully. "Brian — she's talking to _me._ "

"She's pumping you for information," Brian said flatly, glowering at Pamela with fierce hazel eyes. "And she's probably reporting everything we say directly to the Board."

"You think I'm —" She gaped at him in astonishment for a heartbeat before counter-attacking with an outraged hiss: "How _dare_ you! I came here to help him, not to —"

"Amroliwallah brought you here, and he's —"

"Yes, he brought me here, but I promised him nothing — except that I'd bring Allen out of this fugue state he's in, and that's exactly what I intend to do!"

"By doing what?" Brian sneered, setting his coffee on April's table with a decisive _click_ and leaning forward belligerently.  "If you're a double agent, you're pretty damned shitty at it — all you've done so far is sit around reading and bring him cups of —"

 _"Please!"_ April's cry tore their attention from each other; they looked to Allen's position, but his only response to the shout was a slight twitch of his shoulders and a deeper frown. Looking back, they found April regarding them with pained dismay. "We can't fight amongst ourselves," she pleaded in a much lower voice. "We don't have time!"

Pamela drew a deep calming breath, resolving not to engage in Brian's game again. "What happened?" she asked in a deliberately neutral tone although her heart was singing in her breast. "And what do you mean, the project has been shut down?"

Brian rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced. "It hasn't been yet, but it will be soon. He had a meeting with Lily Shueng and Jim Throckmorton, and it sounds like they did everything but pull knives and go for each other's throats. The Board issued an ultimatum: unless he's able to get Joe back up and running by the end of today's day shift they'll pull his entire equipment requisition and impose "stricter sanctions" unless he completely abandons the project and scraps Joe."

Pamela felt both her eyebrows rising sharply. "And he capitulated?"

"Ms. Cunningham," April said earnestly, "they're going send in a team of techs to pull every piece of equipment out of this workshop at five p.m. sharp. The Professor can't physically stop all of them and without these work stations we can't do anything to bring Joe back."

"And Joe needs constant care and service until his archive has been scrubbed and his top shelf cube functions can be restarted," Brian added grimly. "Even if the Professor puts him into cold storage until he can pull together another lab equipped to do the work, he'd run the real risk of never being able to restart Joe at all."

"So we're going to try to restart his top shelf cube functions at three p.m." April stared at her screen with a perturbed line engraved between her delicate eyebrows. "His primary perception filters have been handling the present input levels without a hitch, but that's equivalent to a comatose orga displaying pupillary response — it tells us nothing about how well his process paths will handle live dataflow when we fire them up again, or whether he'll start servicing the interrupt prompts. And even if he services the prompts, he'll suffer a critical freeze if we haven't cleared enough of the track remnants out of his archives."

The quality of hope that burned in Pamela's breast had a strange equivocal quality: that they would fail in their task, breaking Joe completely, and that they'd succeed, and Allen's heart would be spared a shattering blow. "And how close are you to —" 

"April's right — we don't have time for this." Brian picked up his cup again and turned a gaze of hot resentment on Pamela, jabbing the forefinger of his free hand in the direction of her heart. "Listen, if you really want to help the Professor you'll keep bringing us coffee and go get us breakfast and generally see to it that we don't have anything to worry about but the track remnant annihilation — and you'll stay the hell out of our way." He pointed towards the couch. "He wants to be woken up at five a.m. Take care of that for us, will you?"

Fury pulsed hot under the line of Pamela's jaw, but she closed her lips tightly and nodded, allowing only two clipped words to escape: "Of course."

He turned back to the screen without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, addressing April briskly. "Now, if we run the tertiary filter on the compiler array we can probably initiate a…"

Pamela turned away stiff-shouldered, a sudden darkness descending over her sight. She'd just been dismissed like a common lackey — but what else was she, in this situation? Just an extra body that was incapable of aiding in the intellectual aspect of the Great Work, fit only to see to the physical needs of the priests of the temple of Science. 

Paradoxically, it was Brian's own words from an earlier overheard conversation that brought some measure of comfort: _But she's already done some good: he slept more last night  than he's slept in the last week, and he actually seemed to see me when I came in this morning_. So perhaps her presence here was serving a higher function after all, a function that had nothing to do with action and everything to do with personal connection.

Joe's body drew her to its side. Gazing down at its disembodied mask that shone so pale in the fall of warm yellow light, separated from the sharp contour of its sleek black hair by the missing derma panel strips and connected to the workstations by thin cables running from its cube, she found herself wondering again: What was it about this physical shell that compelled Allen so powerfully that he was willing to run any risk on its behalf? It was still a question that raised only more questions in its wake, all of them disquieting.

But the mysteries of her own mind, at least, were becoming more clear. Looking down at Joe's tall slender form, she remembered the source of the words from her dream: a late twentieth century English writer of popular fiction named Richard Adams, who had made a career out of using animals as an allegory for the human condition. He had written a book about a colony of rabbits called _Watership Down_ , and it was from the imagined mythos of the rabbit world that her dreaming mind had drawn its inspiration.

She parsed the past two days, tracing a thread of themes. _The Velveteen Rabbit_ , a tale of the transformative power of love. The remembered myth of El-Ahrairah, a clever trickster who inspired an entire species. Rabbits as a whole, creatures associated with sexuality, lust, lasciviousness, agility, creativity — and the moon. Her subconscious, it seemed, was working to a pattern and leading her rational mind in its wake, like the inexorable draw of the tides. 

Studying Joe's face, she found it not quite so perturbing as she had before. Perhaps she was reluctantly learning to read its language of symbols both arcane and commonplace. She didn't realize that she'd reached down until she felt the material of his left hand under her fingers, the artificial surface cool and smoother than human skin, nearly silken. If his eyes were to open she was suddenly convinced that she would see the ancient moonlight reflected in their alien depths, gazing back at her unblinking.

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand Enemies," she whispered so quietly that Brian and April would not hear her over the soundtrack of Joe's life, "and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you..."


	15. Chapter 15

Five a.m. was over three hours away, so Pamela returned to her perch (how she was starting to hate its every contour and curve!) with another leather-bound book from Allen's shelves: a collection of poetry by various authors from different eras, a miscellany of sufficient variety to tempt her preoccupied mind. With a little diligence she was able to lose herself in the contemplation of technique, but when she turned a page mid-volume and her eye fell upon Sonnet Forty-Three by Elizabeth Barrett Browning she found herself harshly jolted back to the present:

_How do I love thee? Let me count the ways._  
 _I love thee to the depth and breadth and height_  
 _My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight_  
 _For the ends of being and ideal grace._  
 _I love thee to the level of every day's_  
 _Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light._  
 _I love thee freely, as men strive for right._  
 _I love thee purely, as they turn from praise._  
 _I love thee with the passion put to use_  
 _In my old griefs, and with my childhood faith._  
 _I love thee with the love I seemed to lose_  
 _With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,_  
 _Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,_  
 _I shall but love thee better after death._

Slowly the world began to shatter, falling in shards like the petals of razored roses. She read the sonnet through three times, letting each pointed word sink into her spirit like a dagger, and when she closed her eyes to let quiet tears slip free she felt rancour spilling out of her heart like life's-blood, adoration and hatred and yearning and resentment all mingled together. The ache of need surged in long slow waves, each peak keen to the point of making her scream aloud: _Allen, come back to me! Come to my arms, to my mind, to my heart, and let me love you as you were meant to be loved! Don't do this, Allen! Don't throw your life away!I love you! I love you! Oh, how dearly I love you!_

But he could not hear her, and when the fury of need had passed she was left cooler and calmer than she'd felt in many days. But after she'd silently wiped her eyes she closed that book and fetched herself another, one that promised to be a dry history of Tudor England and thus unlikely to stir any passions beyond the intellectual.

***********************************************

At quarter past three Tamara reappeared, looking tired but stubborn, and without a word to her colleagues sat down at her work station with a cup of black coffee and plunged at once into Joe's code. Looking at the mecha, Pamela found herself wondering if the process of filtering hurt him at all. April had said that he possessed a sort of rudimentary awareness in this state: did it amount to a consciousness of the procedures being carried out on his mind? Would he carry a memory trace of that as well when his higher functions were restored?

 _Sympathy for a device?_ She snorted to herself and turned her attention back to the English history. _I must be more done in than I'd thought…_  

The hours crawled by like years.

***********************************************

At five a.m. precisely she rose from her seat, set aside the book (which was almost finished), and crossed to the opposite side of the upper level with little muted clicks of her high heels. Allen had been sleeping peacefully — or so she'd thought. When she got close to him she realized that his face was still haggard, with lines of tension graven on his brow and around his mouth: he slept not tranquilly, but from the necessity of pure exhaustion. The temptation to leave his mind shrouded in merciful oblivion for a little while longer seized her, but she immediately shook it off and went down on one bended knee beside his hips to lay a light hand on his left shoulder and gently rouse him: "Allen? Allen, wake up…"

"Mm?" A drowsy mumble, stirring poignant memories; for an instant a trace of a smile curved his lips, and her heart sang joyously: _He recognizes me! My touch, my voice, my scent…_ Then his eyelids flickered open and his eyes moved to focus on her, and a full smile almost manifested before dread visibly crashed in upon him and destroyed it.

He struggled up onto one elbow, and she almost reached out with her other hand to caress his cheek and nearly leaned down to kiss the pained frown from his forehead. "Joe…"

"The team is working on him." She pitched her voice to a soothing croon. "Just as you instructed."

His gaze was directed beyond her, at the body of her rival, and apprehension ached in his voice: "Is he still stable?"

"I don't know, but nobody's raised an alarm." Even tone, rational tone, calming tone, even though her heart was breaking. She was starting to suspect that its fissures would never heal. "And they would have woken you up if his status had changed, wouldn't they?"

"Yes..." Exhaustion was still written in every line of his body, but he got himself moving again — she withdrew her hand and rose to her feet to step back and give him space — and lurched into a fully upright sitting position with his feet on the floor, pushing the blanket carelessly aside. Gripping the forward edge of the couch and tipping his head back, he closed his eyes and drew a slow deep breath, visibly gathering his reserves in order to stand.

Pamela laid her hand on his shoulder again. "No. Sit still for a minute. Let me get you a cup of coffee."

After a moment he nodded, eyes still closed. "Thank you," he murmured, and she hastened to bring him what she'd offered, made just the way he liked it. As he cradled the mug in both hands and took the first sip, eyes still thoughtfully hooded, she dared to risk sitting down on the couch beside him and was encouraged when he didn't pull away. In fact he didn't seem to notice her at all — until he turned his head and fixed her with a direct gaze full of solemn consideration. She met his blue eyes directly and took pains not to blink.

"I'm surprised you're still here," he said at last, his voice as hoarse as if he'd been weeping.

"Of course I am." Her heart was burning, the boundary between his pain and hers suddenly deeply blurred. She raised her left hand to lay it gently upon his upper right arm, aware of the heat of his skin even through his lab coat and his shirt. "I still care about you, you know."

"Even now." He was searching her face with that keen perceptiveness she so loved. "Even knowing what you know."

"If I didn't," she said with a half-teasing curve of her lips, "I wouldn't keep bringing you peace offerings of food and fresh coffee, would I?"

He surprised her with an answering smile and a trace of a laugh, and joy blossomed in her heart as if the root of it had never been burned to ashes. Watching him take another slow sip, she found herself almost dizzy with tenderness and desire. "No… I suppose you wouldn't."

"You're still tired," she said softly, giving his arm a little squeeze. "You really should get some more sleep."

His smile died on his lips. "I can't. There's no more time. The Board has —"

"I know. Brian and April told me."

He slid a sidelong glance in her direction, mildly reproving. "Have you been conspiring behind my back?"

"Not conspiring," she corrected him, "just looking out for your best interests."

"I see." His gaze had settled on Joe again, and for a long moment he fell silent. She was considering what best to say to him next when he continued: "I really do owe you all a debt of gratitude." He quirked an eyebrow at her. "I can't have been easy to live with these last few days."

"That doesn't matter," she responded promptly. "They adore you, and I…"

He removed his left hand from the cup and, to her surprise and tremendous gratification, laid it lightly over hers on his right bicep. "I know. And for what it's worth, I'm sorry for the way things turned out."

It was hard to speak through the swell of emotions — grief, longing, a surge of exultation — that tightened her throat. "Oh, so am I, Allen. So am I!"

"I would have told you in advance," he continued, "if I'd known. But I didn't. Not until I tried to leave him behind in that placement centre." His gaze held hers, forbidding her to look away, although she desperately wanted to: his regret, and the steely resolve that underlaid it, flayed her to the bone. "It was never my intention to hurt you, but —"

"Don't." She had to blink back the sting of tears. Something was dying between them, and perhaps something new was being reborn. "I mean — I understand that you didn't set out to make things difficult for me. You truly didn't know?"

He shook his head. "I knew that he was important to me, but I didn't suspect the true depth of the attachment." He studied her face for a heartbeat, then turned his head slightly to gaze down into the lower level of the workshop. "If I had, I never would have wasted your time by —"

"No." She infused her voice with conviction, and he turned his attention back to her with clear surprise. "No, you most certainly did _not_ 'waste my time'. You're a remarkable man, and I'll never forget everything we shared together."

"And you're a remarkable woman." The smile was back, but now it was both wry and fond. "One of the finest I've ever met. Whatever happens next, I wish you only happiness."

"And whatever happens next, I'll be there for you." She didn't realize it was true until the words passed her lips, but her heart sang with veritable resonance. "You're still very important to me. I suspect you always will be."

He was still gazing into her eyes, but the quality of his expression had subtly changed, its warmth and affection eclipsed by terrible pain. He glanced away at the floor, but not before she saw a fugitive liquid gleam in his eyes.

She pressed his arm again, and posed the question that had been lurking in her subconscious mind for two days. "When I first arrived, you mentioned that you wished you'd told him something. What was it you wanted to have said?"

He was looking at Joe again with haunted intensity, visibly struggling to free the words from the prison of his heart. "I never told him what I'd realized, because my rational mind couldn't accept saying such a thing to a mecha. I thought that he wouldn't understand." His head bowed forward and he closed his eyes, his fingers tightening over hers and his voice falling to a hoarse whisper: "But he already understood the nature of love, the love that leads to sacrifice, more than I'd ever dreamed possible. And now… now he may never know how much I…"

She closed her eyes in her turn, unable to bear the sight of her beloved's anguished tears when the only gift she had left to give him was that of bearing witness to his deepest and most terrible truth. 


	16. Chapter 16

The day dawned with sullen red fire that quickly faded to shadowy grey gloom, casting heavy rain down upon the shattered city in the sea. It pounded the workshop windows with a constant sibilant hiss punctuated by occasional distant murmurs of thunder, and the spot lighting never went off.

The hours of what might well be Joe's final day ran past with terrible swiftness. Nevertheless at noon Allen banished everyone else to the waiting room, ostensibly to fortify themselves with a quick bite of food and a half hour's mental break before the final push, but Pamela perceived the unspoken truth behind the request: he wanted an interval alone with Joe, in case it should prove to be their last. The doors of frosted glass were closed but she could picture him clearly, standing over the mecha with its right hand clasped in both of his own, perhaps gracing its dialed-down mind with a few final words of tenderness and devotion, or simply gazing into its face to capture a final image of what little presence remained before it was destroyed forever.

But she had not been invited to share in that communion, so she pulled up a chair around the waiting room's central table along with Allen's grad students and sat with her eyes downcast, picking at her food without eating more than a few mouthfuls. She had little appetite, a condition that seemed to be afflicting April and Brian as well. Not Tamara, however: she had put away two sandwiches and a sizeable salad when Brian finally broke the oppressive silence with an aggrieved sigh.

"When this is over," he muttered, almost throwing down his fork before leaning back in his chair, "I'm going to sleep for a bloody week."

Tamara washed down her latest bite of greens with a swallow of milk before replying: "And so shall we all — except, I strongly suspect, the good Professor."

April's eyes, turning to her, widened. "Why not?"

"Because he will too busy either covering Joe in kisses," Tamara smirked, "or else arranging for some form of respectful disposal of whatever remains."

Brian tipped his head back and closed his eyes. "He won't be getting many kisses back: we'll likely have to shut down his sensuality simulation suite, at least temporarily, to avoid overclocking the process paths."

Pamela scowled at him. "A lover-robot without sensuality simulation capabilities? That's…"

"Pointless," Tamara agreed.

"Joe's a lot more than that," April contended stoutly. She looked to Brian again. "How temporarily?"

The olive-skinned specialist shrugged, his eyes still closed. "Could be a week, could be a couple of months. It all depends on the day-to-day neuronal scans after the Professor starts using the inducer on him." He gave another slow loosening-stiff-back-muscles twist of his shoulders before continuing in a tone of conversational weariness: "God, this _sucks._ I never want to see another track remnant as long as I live! It's like going through a huge medieval tapestry and picking out all the white threads while leaving the body of the work intact — and the worst part is knowing that I'm missing some of them… but if Joe survives restart, the inducer will hopefully take care of the outliers later."

Pamela was startled to realize that he was most likely talking to her — and she leaped to take advantage of his communicativeness. "How does the inducer work"

April set down her sandwich at once. "It's meant to be run at least once a day, to put Joe into partial cognitive shutdown and initiate a 1280x memory scan, looking for track remnants and eliminating them on the fly. It'll also clean up any track remnants that have auto-generated from the archive traces during Joe's normal functioning in that twenty-four hour period. The Professor figures that if he runs it daily for a month to six weeks following the restart Joe should be clean enough to step back to running the inducer only once a month or so, but he'll probably never be completely free of track remnants — not after an experience like that."

"We could have done a global hunt-and-kill instead," Brian added, opening his eyes to fix Pamela with a look less hostile than usual, "but that would be like using a shotgun on the tapestry in question instead of a pair of tweezers. It would have worked, and his basic functionality would remain intact, but there wouldn't be a whole lot left of Joe's personality afterwards."

"So we had to do a piece by piece search," Tamara scowled, "using up time that we really did not have. And now we have run out of time entirely."

April was looking down at her hands. "It would kill him," she said in a low voice, then glanced up quickly. "The Professor, I mean."

"The Professor will not die," Tamara said lightly, spearing another forkful of salad. "He has endured three tragedies in his life already, and has not been diminished by them."

"That's just it," April said with quiet vehemence. "He's been through so much! If he loses Joe… it wouldn't be _fair!_ "

Brian barked a harsh little cough of laughter. "Whoever told you that life was fair, April?"

Tamara sighed and put down her fork to turn to April and lay an admonishing hand on the girl's arm, waiting until April turned moist brown eyes towards her face to speak in gentle tones. "I know — you lost your father young, and you view Allen Hobby in that light, yes? And he cares for you also, I think, almost as a daughter." She glanced up to include Brian in her assessment. "He cares for all of us, and if Joe does not survive this procedure, we will still be here to stand by him. And to remember for the rest of our lives, because what they shared does not deserve to be forgotten."

April sniffled softly, raising one hand to wipe at the tears that had finally slipped free. "We've got to save him," she whispered, but now there was steel underlying her quavering voice. "We _can't_ fail the Professor!"

Brian sighed in his turn, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the tabletop and running both hands slowly through his short hair from back to front, making it stand up in even more emphatic spikes. "We may not have a choice," he said wearily. "Sometimes the best you can do… just isn't enough."

"It will be," Pamela said, surprising nobody more than herself.

There was a moment of silence as the eyes of the three grad students turned to her and widened simultaneously. She took that moment to have an unhurried sip of her coffee, watching the sequence of conclusions fall into place in her own mind with no less amazement — and when she spoke again, it was with quiet but certain conviction: "You're all the top students in your field, and Allen has inspired you to perform even beyond your own expectations." Her throat tightened afresh and she wondered at her own apostasy, but she managed to speak through it. "His love has inspired you, and you love him enough in return that that mecha has become almost as important to you as it is to him."  

She looked at Brian, who was staring back at her with his mouth slightly open. "You said it yourself, Brian: if Allen's desire alone could bring Joe through this, you'd guarantee that he would recover. But he doesn't just have Allen pulling for him — he has all of you, almost as brilliant and equally driven. And I believe that while science has many of the answers, it has nowhere near all of them." She nodded back toward the workshop, where a machine lay awaiting their final intervention with the world's top roboticist gazing down upon him from on high, lost in adoration. "You're young, but that's a vital lesson to learn at any age: when love is involved, all bets are off. if Joe's cube fails, his final moments will be spent surrounded by people who genuinely care about him. That's a gift that many orga never receive, and it's something that I know Allen will never forget — and that he'll always be grateful for, even in the depths of his grief."

She unfolded herself from her chair and put aside her coffee, placing it exactly three inches from the right side of her plate with great care. "Excuse me," she said politely before crossing to the door that led out into the common hallway. The thoroughfare was deserted, and she was dimly grateful for that small mercy as she closed the door behind her and leaned back against the wall beside it and covered her face with her hands and finally burst into copious tears, managing to confine the worst noise of her weeping to the occasional choke of harshly indrawn breath.

 _Allen,_ her heart wailed like fire in her breast, _oh Allen! Allen!_ But for the first time she did not mourn her own shattered connection alone. For the first time she truly felt the full force of the gravity drawing together two great celestial bodies and knew that she was but a satellite: existing in conjunction, connected to them both with invisible ties, but ultimately a minor star whose own light was lost in the splendour of their combined radiance. 

_Was he ever really mine?_

She closed her eyes hard against the consuming waves of misery, but could not ignore the wisdom of the serpent that had awakened within her, its venom conferring both death and rebirth. And had she not reached for the apple it offered herself, and tasted it willingly?  

"Allen," she moaned against her hands, "please…"  But he was far away and did not hear her crying helplessly for what could never be hers again.

***********************************************

_Nous aurons pour nous l'éternité dans le bleu de toute l'immensité_  
 _Dans le ciel plus de problèmes... mon amour crois-tu qu'on s'aime?…_  
 _Dieu réunit ceux qui s'aiment…_

And thus it came full circle.

She stood on the upper level in front of her usual point of surveillance, clasping the railing in both hands as the clock counted down the final minutes. The team had set up a rank of three small monitors and a keyboard behind Joe's head and to his right, and Allen had drawn a stool into position beside Joe's right hip. He sat there now intently studying the code flow that his students were feeding to his temporary station, his face set with such tension that Pamela wanted to go to him and comfort him in her embrace. She tightened her grip on the railing to hold herself in place.

Thirty seconds to three, and Allen commanded tersely: "Discontinue playlist and commence primary process path initialization." At once the background stream of music faded to silence, which descended on the workshop like the chill of winter's snow; only the lash and hiss of rain against the nearly black windows remained. It was as fine a case of pathetic fallacy as Pamela had ever seen manifested in real life.

"Initializing," Brian confirmed, tapping at his interfaces. At their own stations April and Tamara watched their screens with unwavering diligence and Pamela, even knowing as little as she did about mecha code visualization protocols, could see that the flowing lines of green symbols were beginning to move more swiftly.

"Initialization in progress," Brian half-chanted. "Primary path online at six percent… twelve percent… twenty percent…"

"I'm getting resonance activity on the secondary path," April chimed in, her hands dancing over her keyboard. 

"Initialize," Allen ordered, his own gaze never wavering from his monitors.

April took up the litany: "Secondary path online at three percent…"

And Brian: "Forty-one percent…"

"Eleven percent… thirteen percent…"

Tamara interjected evenly: "He is servicing the prompts. Track remnants at one point three percent and holding."

Allen had taken Joe's right hand in his own, and now he spared a glance for the mecha's face, which remained as impassive as the grave. "Joe? Joe, can you hear me?" 

"Forty-three point five percent," Brian said, and there was strain in his voice that sent a chill of dread down Pamela's spine. "Forty three point three… forty-two point eight…"

April's tone likewise carried a frisson of alarm: "Thirteen point two percent… Thirteen point one…"

Tamara's hands flew across her interface. "Imminent process stall," she announced briskly. "Initiating compensation protocol A-3." 

Allen's grip on Joe's hand had tightened convulsively, and now he was gazing down at the robot's mask with raw desperation surging in his eyes. His murmured command was so agonized that Pamela almost left her post: "Come on, Joe… come back to me…"

"Forty-one point six," Brian said quietly. "Thirty-nine percent… thirty-eight…"

"Twelve percent… eleven…"

 _"No."_ It was only a whisper, but nevertheless it amounted to a cry of despair that flayed Pamela's heart to the quick. Allen was paying no attention whatsoever to the monitors now: he was utterly focussed on the dying form before him, and as she watched he slipped his left hand around the back of the mecha's neck to grasp it with pleading power. "Joe —"

"Thirty-five percent," Brian intoned, and April shook her head once, savagely. Pamela's vision started to blur with the sting of tears —

— but she could still clearly see the sudden determination that filled Allen's eyes, as strong as death itself. He lifted Joe's head by the nape of that slender neck and leaned forward to press a long, tender, hungry kiss to the unresponsive lips of the object of his desire. For almost three heartbeats time itself seemed to stand still; even the sibilance of the rain faded as everyone else present held their collective breath.

Then a fine tremor wracked Joe's entire body, flowing from his head to his heels. His eyes flew open, full of electric intensity; for an instant he gazed up into Allen's face with what almost seemed to be surprise, before his tinted eyelids drifted closed again and he leaned up a little and parted his lips ever so slightly in a lover-robot's unspoken invitation. His left hand twitched again, then his whole arm, but the damage to his left shoulder had rendered him incapable of responding with an embrace and Allen's right hand still held his own fast.

It was Brian who first intruded upon the breathless silence: "Primary process path at seventy-four percent and rising on a Norwich vector."

April all but sang: "Secondary processing path at seventy-two percent and rising on the vector!"

"Process flow at ninety-seven percent," Tamara concluded with a note of smug satisfaction. "And rising."

Pamela had no attention to spare for them: her eyes were fixed on the reunited lovers, and on the reborn passion that bloomed between them and filled the cold dark room with the perfume of undying devotion. When their lips at last reluctantly parted Joe's eyes remained closed for a second longer before opening to unleash his cool green gaze, intelligently parsing every detail of the face of the man above him. "Allen…?"

"Welcome back, Joe." His voice was hoarse, but his eyes were shining with exultation.

Unblinking, Joe scanned to his left, above him, and to his right, making as complete a circuit of the environment as he could, although his head never shifted from its direction alignment with Allen's. "We're in your workshop. What happened? I ran away…"

"And I found you." A radiant smile warmed his face, but he subdued it and subtly tightened his grip on the back of Joe's neck in a way that was both admonishing and adoring. "Did you really think that I wouldn't search to the ends of the earth, as soon as I realized you were missing?"

"The letter I left behind…"

"Told me everything I needed to know." His unwavering gaze traced the lines of the mecha's eyebrows, his cheeks, his lips, drinking in every fine detail of vital movement even as his tone grew commanding again: "Joe… never, ever do anything like that again — not without talking to me about it first. That's a direct order. Will you promise to obey it?"

A tiny frown tightened his flawless forehead. "Yes, of course I will… but I don't understand…"

The smile flickered to the surface again, although he was still trying to be stern. "Go on."

His gaze shifted to his left again — the briefest redirection of attention, but his eyes met Pamela's for an instant that left her both warmed and chilled. "Pamela Cunningham… you still love her. You said so yourself."

This time the smile lit up his entire face, although there was a trace of undeniable sadness underlying it. "Yes, I do love her. But I love you far, far more."

"That's not possible," Joe responded at once. "I am neither —"

"— neither flesh nor blood, yes, I'm well aware of that." He tasted the mecha's lips again with a kiss lighter and briefer but no less poignant. "And no, it isn't possible, according to conventional wisdom. But it's true nonetheless. I only wish I'd told you the moment I realized it, instead of keeping it to myself. That's a mistake I never intend make again."

He was studying Allen's face with that tiny frown again. "But… I was dead. The ground swallowed me up."

Allen shook his head ever so slightly. "No — not dead. Merely sleeping."

"And you awakened me with a kiss." A radiant smile touched his lips and brightened his eyes to an amazing degree, before his expression clouded with wariness as solemn as a child's. "Are you very angry with me?"

A soft incredulous laugh. "Yes, I suppose I am — and so much in love with you that it doesn't matter." He leaned in to press his forehead to Joe's, to meet the mecha's clear-eyed gaze and to whisper against his parted lips: "And I promise you that I'll tell you so every night and every day from now on, until you have no choice but to believe me."

Brian's voice interrupted their conversation with a low respectful murmur: "He's overclocking on both process paths and his sensubs are three point six percent over recommended maximum flow…"

Allen raised his head just enough to glance over the readouts in front of him. "Shut down everything but his Level One sensuality subroutines," he ordered, before returning his undivided attention to the mecha's face and once more pitching his voice to that caressing inflection. "Joe, I'm going to deactivate you now so we can —"

"No!" His eyes widened even more. "Don't, please…"

"I'll be right here with you the whole time, I promise you, and I'll be waiting for you when you wake up again. But we need to make further repairs, and I don't want you to be conscious during the procedures."

"I want to stay with you," Joe insisted.

"I know you do." He laid Joe back in the chair again, guiding the mecha's head gently to rest with his left hand still curved around the nape of his neck. "And you _will_ be with me, for the rest of our lives. But first I need to finish repairing your wounds. Now close your eyes, and don't be afraid… "

"How could I possibly be afraid?" He lay back obediently and let Allen sit upright without protest, but his right hand still clasped the human's tightly. "You'll be with me, won't you?"

"Always, and I'll never let anybody hurt you again." His eyes were so bright that Pamela could barely look upon them as he slipped his left hand from behind the mecha's head and laid it to his cheek, taking care not to disturb the cables emerging from his right temple. "Goodnight, Joe."

"Goodnight, Allen." He closed his eyes, and Allen glanced up in Brian's direction and nodded once. The Cognitive Engineering student input another command and Pamela could see all the tiny cues of Joe's body go still again as his cube functions were temporarily suspended.

Silence fell again, but this time it was had the quality of the joyous hush of dawn after a long and terrible darkness. Allen tore his gaze away from Joe to glance round at his students: Brian, then Tamara, and at last April. He slipped his hand from Joe's and rose to his feet, and when April leaped from her chair and came running to him he turned to meet her, laughing as she embraced him enthusiastically and wrapping one arm around her shoulders to hold her warmly close, extending his other hand to Brian as the younger man came out from behind his own work station. Only Tamara sat apart, but she leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers in front of her, and even though her back was to Pamela she fancied the European was smiling herself as Brian shook Allen's hand heartily, wearing a grin broader than any Pamela had ever seen him sport before.

Celebrating their shared triumph, the trio standing beside Joe didn't notice when Tamara turned to glance up at Pamela and nodded, once.

Pamela nodded in return and turned away toward the walk-in closet. Her work here was done, save for one final self-imposed act of duty, of recognition — and of personal devotion.


	17. Chapter 17

It was the matter of only a few minutes to pack all her clothes back into her suitcase, the muted click of its locks conveying a note of finality to her ears. When she emerged into the workshop again she found it abuzz with activity of a different kind: Allen and Tamara were leaning over Joe, cutting and stripping away the muddied jacket and shirt from his left shoulder to reveal a glowing orange operating license that indicated personal ownership, and Brian was back at his workstation sing-songing tech talk commands to its interface. April was nowhere to be seen.

Silently Pamela set the suitcase down beside the armchair, now hers no longer, and went back into the closet again. Joe's suit waited there, dove-grey and slightly glossy as if moonlight had been woven into its essential substance; she took it down and layered the shirt of gleaming white inside its jacket, then picked up the shoes of charcoal grey and carried all out to her former post. There she set down the shoes before the chair and folded the clothing neatly to lay it on the seat, smoothing its lapels carefully with her left hand and reflecting that it really was exquisitely made. Joe would look beautiful in it by sun and candle-light, and Allen's heart would rejoice. 

The thought brought another surge of pain along with it, but there was marginally less pain than there was pleasurable sympathy at the prospect of their happiness. She was smiling sadly to herself as she stepped back, bent to pick up her suitcase, and headed for the frosted glass doors for the final time. Presumably the room Asheed had provided for her was still available, and even if it wasn't he could surely arrange transport back to the mainland in short —

She had just reached the doors when a soft cry rose from behind her: "Pamela, wait!" 

Turning, she saw that Allen had left Joe's side and was striding swiftly to the stairs, taking them two at a time to reach her side. Looking up into his eyes, now clear and calm beneath his slight frown, she heard again his declaration: _Yes, I do love her..._

She smiled at him, and reached out to take his hand. "Goodbye, Allen." 

He was studying her face closely. "Where are you going? If you need accommodations —"

"Asheed has taken care of that, I think." 

After a moment he nodded. "If not, just let me know." A glance back toward the lower level, where Tamara was peering critically into Joe's damaged workings and Brian appeared to be concentrating on his screens to the exclusion of all else. "I'm going to be spending the next day or two here, so you're welcome to make use of my own apartment if need be."

She shook her head. "I don't want to inconvenience you. I expect I'll be heading back to the mainland on the next copter he can book for me, in any case."

He looked down into her face again with a slight tilt of his head, and there was a quality of yearning in his gaze that made her heart melt within her: it was part of what she loved most about him, that he was capable of both sternness and tenderness in equal measure. His voice was soft: "Will I ever see you again?"

She smiled at him, letting him see the answering warmth in her eyes, and squeezed his fingers. "That's up to you. But I'd like that. In fact, I'd like it very much."

Wrapped in his embrace, she held him close and buried her face against his shoulder one final time, drawing a deep breath of his scent: invigorating, masculine, profoundly human, but intimately mingled with the sweetness of artificial roses. For the first time that she could remember, that union of opposites did not fill her with the pain that arose from resisting what was destined to be. She closed her eyes against the bright sting of tears and bowed her head, listening to the slow deep beat of their human hearts, so close and yet separated by a gulf that was beyond her merely human power to bridge. 

He loved her, yes, but the fact remained that he truly belonged to another and that he had chosen that connection over everything she had to offer. No matter what censure society might lay upon him, no matter what the risk or the danger, no matter what else he stood to lose, she knew now that he would always choose Joe. And in that realization she found that she loved him indeed, for she feared for him so deeply that her heart pounded miserably in her breast.

But for Allen, at this moment, there was no fear — there was only joy, and a transitory sorrow in their parting. He whispered against her hair — "Goodbye, Pamela." — and she held him closer still, knowing that she must let him go, yet daring to hope against all odds that they might go on beyond this farewell. 

That love, however flawed and however mortal, would live between them again. And in that thought her aching heart found, at last, a brief solace of pure and perfect peace.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, as performed by Rufus Wainwright:
> 
> "Maybe I have been here before  
> I know this room, I've walked this floor  
> I used to live alone before I new you  
> I've seen your flag on the marble arch  
> Love is not a victory march  
> It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."
> 
> Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbO6P-_Zx0Y


End file.
